AnalPhilosopher

Dennis Mangan sent a link to this debate about PETA's Bucket of Blood campaign against KFC. Thanks, Dennis.

Keith,

Thanks for sending me your recent blog entry [see here] on eating meat. I am not a purist in the sense you attribute to me. Of course, I agree that the state of affairs of one woman being raped is objectively LESS BAD, than the state of affairs of twenty-four women being raped. I acknowledge the comparative judgment. I just don't think it gets the rapist (or you) off the hook. Even committing one rape is so bad that the rapist deserves serious moral sanction. I know you think of rape as an extremely heinous instance of wrongdoing. I don't think that, in the case of rape, you would maintain, of a person who regularly rapes 24 women a year, but who out of conscience cuts back to only one rape a year, that that person has done enough where rape is concerned. One rape is one too many. Better than twenty-four? Yes. Good enough. NO!

How is your position on eating fish any different?

Your friend,

Mylan

Yes, Texans say "Y'all," as in "Y'all come back now, y'hear?" I don't think I ever heard this expression in Michigan, where I spent the first twenty-six years of my life. We would say "You guys." I may have heard it a few times in Tucson, where I lived for five years before moving to Texas. I'm pretty sure I've never said it myself, although perhaps one day I will. I'm becoming Texan.

Sometimes you hear "All y'all," which is short, I gather, for "All of you all." Why not "All of you"? Why not "Tejas"? It's the way things are. A few months ago, while waiting for a train to pass, I read the graffiti on the cars. One item jumped out at me: "Fuck y'all." I like to think a Texan wrote it, or maybe someone mad at (or envious of) Texans.

Today's link is to The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

War, n. A by-product of the arts of peace. The most menacing political condition is a period of international amity. The student of history who has not been taught to expect the unexpected may justly boast himself inaccessible to the light. "In time of peace prepare for war" has a deeper meaning than is commonly discerned; it means, not merely that all things earthly have an end—that change is the one immutable and eternal law—but that the soil of peace is thickly sown with seeds of war and singularly suited to their germination and growth. It was when Kubla Khan had decreed his "stately pleasure dome"—when, that is to say, there were peace and fat feasting in Xanadu—that he

heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war.

One of the greatest of poets, Coleridge was one of the wisest of men, and it was not for nothing that he read us this parable. Let us have a little less of "hands across the sea," and a little more of that elemental distrust that is the security of nations. War loves to come like a thief in the night; professions of eternal amity provide the night.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

To the Editor:

"Militants in Europe Openly Call for Jihad and the Rule of Islam" (front page, April 26) reports on the growing cry for Islamic supremacy in Western countries. These European militants spoke freely and proudly of terror bombings to split the Western alliance and of bringing the fight for Islamic supremacy to Europe.

These are not wild threats made by fools. These are the goals of a movement already well advanced.

After Hitler published "Mein Kampf," the world knew about his racial theories and plans for world domination but largely dismissed them as the rantings of a madman. After he became leader of Germany, and even after he began to gobble up parts of Europe, the threat was not taken seriously.

What does it take to wake us up? Senators in Washington question why we didn't mobilize against vague warnings of a terror attack. While that lapse might be forgiven, how will we excuse our lack of preparation and the failure of public alarm in the face of plans for a war on Western civilization that has already begun?

BARRY A. WADLER
Hackensack, N.J., April 26, 2004

On a lighter note, here is a link to a T-shirt company that may be of interest (but in which I have no financial or other interest). I, personally, need a T-shirt like I need a blow to the head. I get a T-shirt at nearly every bike rally and footrace I do. I've done 327 bike rallies and over a hundred footraces. My walk-in closet is filled with T-shirts!

How many times have you heard it said that the war in Iraq was a "war of choice" rather than a "war of necessity"? The implication (hard to miss) is that we didn't have to wage war. We wanted to. Or rather, President Bush wanted to. There's even a whiff of whimsy about "war of choice," as if President Bush sent soldiers to die for little or nothing, just because he felt like it. This is of course obscene, but our political discourse has become obscene in recent years. There seem no limits—not even decency—to what is said.

Let's unpack the distinction between the two types of war. There's a sense in which no war is necessary and every war is chosen. Was it necessary that the United States enter World War II? No. We could have taken the hit at Pearl Harbor and stayed out of the fray. But we chose to fight. The question we should be asking is whether the choice to wage war in Iraq was a good choice, not whether it was a choice. Some choices are good, some bad. Just think of the choices you make every day.

Suppose I learn that my neighbor is tormenting his dogs. I try to persuade him to stop, but he won't. I hear howls every night. Since persuasion doesn't work, I try manipulation. I cajole, plead, and even deceive. That doesn't work, either. Finally, I resort to coercion. I threaten the neighbor with harm if he doesn't stop tormenting his dogs. If this doesn't work, I'm left with two options: do nothing or use force. Suppose I break into my neighbor's back yard and liberate his dogs. Is that a break-in of necessity or a break-in of choice? It's a break-in of choice. But it's the right choice.

Perhaps the distinction between wars of choice and wars of necessity is supposed to map onto the distinction between aggressive and defensive wars, or between wars one starts and wars to which one responds. Saying that the war in Iraq is a war of choice is to say that it's a war of aggression, with the implication that this is unacceptable.

But as even Jonathan Glover (hardly a warmonger!) points out, not all wars of aggression are wrong and not all defensive wars are right. (See Jonathan Glover, Causing Death and Saving Lives [Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1977], 268-70.) The question is not what type of war it is, but whether it's right or wrong. This is a normative question. It needs to be faced directly.

May I suggest that we stop distinguishing between wars of choice and wars of necessity? It not only doesn't resolve the important normative questions about war; it obscures them. The main task of the philosopher, in my view, is to elucidate and clarify. Okay, the main task of the analytic philosopher is to elucidate and clarify. Some philosophers seem hell-bent on obfuscating.

I believe it is the duty of every intellectual to be aware of the privileged position he is in. He has a duty to write as simply and clearly as he can, and in as civilized a manner as he can; and never to forget either the great problems which beset mankind and which demand new and bold but patient thought, or the Socratic modesty of the man who knows how little he knows. As against the minute philosophers with their minute problems, I think that the main task of philosophy is to speculate critically about the universe and about our place in the universe, including our powers of knowing and our powers for good and evil.

(Karl R. Popper, "How I See Philosophy," chap. 1 in The Owl of Minerva: Philosophers on Philosophy, ed. Charles J. Bontempo and S. Jack Odell [New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1975], 41-55, at 54-5)

Here is the letter (advertisement) to which Martin Luther King Jr replied in his famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail." Written by eight white clergymen, this letter appeared in The Birmingham News. King read the letter in his jail cell and composed his reply in the margins with a pen smuggled in to him by his attorney. Here (PDF) and here (HTML) is King's reply, which David Luban calls "perhaps the most famous document to emerge from the civil rights movement."

See here for a post about soy milk.

Benefactor, n. One who makes heavy purchases of ingratitude, without, however, materially affecting the price, which is still within the means of all.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Bill Keezer over at Bill's Comments has some interesting posts, including one on religious belief. See here.

I posted the six negative letters I received about my Tech Central Station column "Explaining Liberal Anger." I did not post the hundred or more positive letters I received. Two of the six negativists took me to task for saying (or implying) that all liberals hold the views I ascribed to liberalism. This is supposedly overgeneralizing, which is supposedly bad.

This misconceives what I was doing. Twenty-six years ago, Ronald Dworkin, a prominent liberal, published an essay entitled "Liberalism," in which he distinguished between what is constitutive of liberalism and what is derivative from it. The constitutive part is, in Aristotelian terms, the essence of liberalism—that without which it would not be liberalism. The derivative part is accidental. Dworkin asked, for example, whether commitment to the market is of the essence of liberalism or a mere means to achieve liberal ends. It's a mere means, he said. If it should turn out that some other means achieves liberal ends better than the market, then the liberal should abandon the market.

To Dworkin, the essence of liberalism is equality. Not liberty; not neutrality; but equality. And not equality of opportunity, either. Equality of resources. According to Dworkin, "market allocations must be corrected in order to bring some people closer to the share of resources they would have had but for . . . various differences of initial advantage, luck, and inherent capacity." Some of the letter-writers expressed amazement that I would ascribe such a view to liberals. I suggest they read John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, the two greatest liberals this country has produced. They seem ignorant of the past thirty years of political philosophy.

When I say that liberals believe this or that, I'm not making a claim about everyone who considers himself or herself a liberal. I'm not reporting the results of a survey. I'm making a claim about liberalism. There are two possibilities. Either I've got liberalism wrong or the people who consider themselves liberals aren't really liberals. The letter-writers assume the former. This is uncharitable to me. But then, liberals tend not to be charitable to those with whom they disagree. I believe you can see that in the letters I posted, which are eager to condemn and insult me but reluctant to engage me on intellectual ground. If you think I've got liberalism wrong, you need to give the correct account.

By the way, Dworkin's essay appears as chapter 8 in A Matter of Principle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 181-204. You might also read chapter 9: "Why Liberals Should Care About Equality," 205-13. (The quotation in the third paragraph of this post comes from this chapter; see page 207.) And while you're at it, read John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1971; rev. ed., 1999). Then, to top it off, read this essay by John Kekes and this essay by Peter Berkowitz.

To the Editor:

Like all asymmetric conflicts, the continuing "debate" on abortion rights (front page, April 26) is not a true debate because there is little direct intellectual engagement between opponents.

On one side the issue hinges on individual rights, while the other sees abortion as an act of murder. The crux of the debate is rarely discussed directly: the legal delineation of when life begins, whether at conception, the time a fetus is independently viable, or birth.

Unfortunately such a discussion requires difficult scientific, philosophical and religious discourse that is far too profound for an America that was built by uniting heterogeneity with simple ideologies. It is far easier to march in the name of personal freedoms or call someone a murderer.

HENRY WU
Philadelphia, April 26, 2004

[I]f men are not devils, neither are they angels; and the fact that they are a mean between these two extremes is something which makes a system of mutual forbearances both necessary and possible. With angels, never tempted to harm others, rules requiring forbearances would not be necessary. With devils prepared to destroy, reckless of the cost to themselves, they would be impossible.

(H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law, 2d ed., with a postscript edited by Penelope A. Bulloch and Joseph Raz [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994], 196 [first edition published in 1961])

Are you really a professor of philosophy? Listen to yourself [see here]:

1. Liberals believe everyone ought to control the same amount of resources.

2. They believe that no one is born to advantage and if any one is, the state must neutralize that.

3. Liberals believe that all misfortune, any misfortune, needs addressing and social engineering.

4. They believe only accidents account for differences in wealth.

5. They give no account whatsoever to personal responsibility.

6. They say folks are only functions of our circumstances and they hold no belief in the value or autonomy of the person.

7. Liberals will not, cannot, argue rationally, and when met with opposition, they allege ignorance, stupidity or evil.

I list what you have said because the cumulative effect of these propositions leads me to think that you really are a liberal agent trying to inflame whomever reads what you wrote such that he or she will simply go over to the liberal side out of frustration with the quality of your thought.

The great irony winding its way through your piece is that it exemplifies much about what you complain, particularly on the point of rational argument. A list of windy, overstuffed bromides of caricature dominates your piece and I'm afraid it gets an F.

I think many of you folks at Tech Central Station simply like talking to each other.

Sincerely

Itzik Basman
a proudly liberal, atheist Canadian

I've done 327 bike rallies. If you're wondering what a bike rally is like, see here. This rally was the Collin County Classic, held on 8 June 2002. I rode 65.54 miles that day at an average speed of 17.08 miles per hour. Not one of my faster rallies, but I had fun. Get on your bike and ride!

desert, n.

1. Deserving; the becoming worthy of recompense, i.e. of reward or punishment, according to the good or ill of character or conduct; worthiness of recompense, merit or demerit.

b. In a good sense: Meritoriousness, excellence, worth.

c. personified.

2. An action or quality that deserves its appropriate recompense; that in conduct or character which claims reward or deserves punishment. Usually in pl. (often = 1.)

b. A good deed or quality; a worthy or meritorious action; a merit. ? Obs.

3. That which is deserved; a due reward or recompense, whether good or evil. Often in phr. to get, have, meet with one's deserts.

Here is the only image of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, where he delivered his famous address. Here is some background information. Here is the text of the address.

To the Editor:

Re "A Stronger Force in Iraq" (editorial, April 25):

Now that we are trying to find a politically palatable solution to getting out of Iraq, I offer a democratic solution: Let the United Nations hold a vote in Iraq with one question: Do you want the United States to leave or to stay?

If more than 50 percent say "stay," then we'll stay with the backing of the people. If more say "go," we'll teach them the meaning of democracy by leaving.

JOHN LIPUMA
Flushing, Queens, April 27, 2004

Teetotaler, n. One who abstains from strong drink, sometimes totally, sometimes tolerably totally.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

"Deep down, liberals deny that anyone is responsible for anything." [See here.] George W. Bush is responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent Iraqis. The CIA is responsible for Saddam Hussein's rise. Reagan was responsible for Saddam's stalemate with Iran and development of anthrax and other WMD's.

I am responsible for my own life and education. The state is increasingly responsible for burdensome public tuition rates.

"Liberals, unlike conservatives, are zealous. Like all zealots (true believers), they are eager to implement their program, but when they attempt to do so, they meet resistance."

This is false on its face. Calling some liberals zealous is acceptable, but your omission of the apocalyptic frenzy of the modern conservative movement shows your ideological agenda. Pray who has been responsible for the Oklahoma City, the Atlanta Olympic, and countless abortion clinic bombings? Conservatives following an ideology espoused by our President and Attorney General. President Bush looked to his "higher father" and invaded Iraq in order to carry out the grand vision of Paul Wolfowitz and the rest of the Neocons: A new Middle East that accepts Western Philosophy and American Capital, pumps crude oil, and accepts Israel's ethnic cleansing.

We are angry at the Zealots: Bush II, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Richard Pearl, etc. and all their bilious apologists.

To call liberals angry and ignore the public tantrums of Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, betrays your motive: Agitprop. One would expect more from Philosophy Professor. Maybe something about the decreasing civility of public discourse or something along those lines. But that would be too much to ask for from a Conservative Propagandist.

Of course, you ARE publishing in the oh so glamorous TCS. . . .

Andrew Portner

Several readers have expressed puzzlement about the word "desert," as in the expression "responsibility and desert." It's not a typographical error. "Desert," as in giving people their just deserts, means deservingness. Good behavior deserves reward; bad behavior deserves punishment. Have you seen Unforgiven (1992)? The character played by Clint Eastwood says to the character played by Gene Hackman, "Deserve's got nothin' to do with it." He meant, and should have said, "Desert's got nothin' to do with it." This inarticulate line ruined the film for me.

If you want to read up on desert, see George Sher, Desert, Studies in Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy, ed. Marshall Cohen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). See also Joel Feinberg, Doing and Deserving: Essays in the Theory of Responsibility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), esp. chap. 4 ("Justice and Personal Desert"); and Geoffrey Cupit, Justice as Fittingness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), chap. 2 ("Justice and Desert").

The e-mail is still pouring in. My Tech Central Station column "Explaining Liberal Anger," which I wrote in fifteen minutes (it was supposed to be a blog entry), is being posted and linked to on other sites, such as Front Page Magazine. I've been invited to appear on Hannity & Colmes. I'm getting reprint requests.

Almost all the e-mail has been favorable. Several people begged me to write a book. Many described their own journey to conservatism. Some thanked me for articulating what they think and feel. I posted the nasty letters on this blog, not so much to embarrass their authors (although they deserve it) as to prove my point that liberals have lost the capacity to reason. They think righteous indignation and name-calling amount to argumentation. Make up your own mind. As I say in my column, I was a liberal for many years. I know the mindset, the secrets, the tactics. I'm a traitor to liberalism as far as liberals are concerned. I'm to liberalism what Richard Rorty is to analytic philosophy.

My inbox contains eighty-nine messages. Oops! Two more just came in. I'll try to respond to ten writers a day until I'm done. Bear with me. Thanks for taking the time to write, whether you agree or disagree with me. I hope you find my blog interesting and provocative. Blogito ergo sum!

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was, by all accounts, a brilliant philosopher, mathematician, and geometer. I admire him very much, although I reject his theism. Pascal famously argued that it's prudent to believe in God, since, if your belief turns out to be true, "you gain all," while if it turns out to be false, "you lose nothing." This is known as Pascal's Wager. It's not an argument for the existence of God. It's an argument for belief in God. It's not an epistemic argument. It's what Michael Martin calls a beneficial argument. (See Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990], chap. 9.) You should believe in God, Pascal says, not because there's evidence for God's existence, but because it's good for you. It's in your interest.

I've defended Pascal in print against what I consider ill-founded and unfair criticism. It's no criticism of Pascal's argument that his premises aren't universally accepted. He didn't direct his argument to everyone. He directed it to a numerically small class of individuals: his backsliding Christian friends. He constructed an argument the premises of which he knew these friends accepted in the hope of inducing them to accept its conclusion. It's a brilliant specimen of the Lockean argumentum ad hominem (which is not to be confused with the ad hominem fallacy; see here for a discussion of the difference).

At one point in his discussion of the wager, Pascal has his critic say that, while he (the critic) is persuaded that belief in God is beneficial, and would like to believe, he can't just make himself believe. What should he do? Pascal recommends attending mass and taking holy water. The idea seems to be that if you go through the motions of belief, you will eventually find yourself believing. Belief in God isn't something one does. It's something that happens to one.

Here's where I get puzzled. Why does Pascal think that mere belief suffices for eternal life and happiness? He explicitly disclaims any knowledge of God's existence or attributes. If I were God, I would inquire into the grounds or antecedents of belief. Wouldn't you? Frankly, I would not be impressed if I were told that my interlocutor believed in me out of self-interest. That's sycophancy. I would probably be more impressed by a conscientious agnostic or atheist. Nor does Pascal emphasize the consequences of belief. Shouldn't believers have to act upon their belief in order to earn salvation? Perhaps Pascal thought that works would flow spontaneously from belief; but if he thought this, he should have said so and given reason to believe it. He makes it seem as though it's the fact of belief, and nothing else, that matters. He must think God a fool.

Today's link is to A Philosophical Chronology, by Peter S. Fosl. See here. Peter (here is his homepage) teaches at lovely and historic Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky.

I haven't seen my mother in over ten years (since 31 December 1993), so she would probably love to see me on Hannity & Colmes. But I'm a writer, not a talker. Sorry, Mom.

Hello,

My name is Tara Nicaj and I work on the show Hannity & Colmes on the Fox News Channel. I am writing to invite you to appear on our show to discuss your article titled, "Explaining Liberal Anger." We would really love to have you on to talk about this so if you could get back to me I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!

Best,

Tara Nicaj
Hannity & Colmes
Fox News Channel

Wow. Do you really believe all that [see here] about all liberals? I am not familiar with your style of writing. Was that article intended to be humorous? If not may I be the first to say that labeling such a large group of people with such gross generalizations might be a poor way to get your point across. Perhaps you are used to inflammatory speech to get the attention of disinterested [sic] students at UT.

Wish I had time to address each point but like many liberals I have to work for a living and must get to it. I must confess, though, that the more I read your article the more speechless I become. I will just file it under "can't say anything good, better to say nothing" as I was taught as a child. Wow.

Dana Park

Does anyone remember Michael Deaver? Deaver worked for Ronald Reagan. He understood, better than anyone then or since, that images matter. Someone asked Deaver if he were concerned about a negative story on one of the nightly newscasts. Deaver said he was not the least bit concerned. In fact, he was delighted! When queried, he explained that the images of Reagan that accompanied the story were favorable. Reagan was smiling and in charge. People don't listen to the words, he said; they see the images.

The flap about John Kerry's medals is much ado about nothing. But those images! Look: This country is still divided about Vietnam. It will be divided for as long as anyone who lived through it is alive. John Kerry may have fought valiantly for his country, but he turned against his fellow soldiers when he came home. Night after night, we see images of John Kerry with long, scraggly hair, wearing military fatigues on the streets of the nation's capital, in the company of other scruffy protesters, causing trouble. These images are being seared into the nation's consciousness.

Don't say Kerry was in the right. That's irrelevant. Many people think the war was right and that those who protested it gave aid and comfort to the enemy. Images don't lie. We see how Kerry behaved thirty-odd years ago. We see the crowd he ran with. We see the tension he sought to generate. I'm afraid this election is over, folks. Journalists will do everything they can to make it a horse race (for their own selfish reasons), but it's over. By the time the first Tuesday in November rolls around, John Kerry will be reduced to an America-hating, rabble-rousing, antiestablishment hippie.

Suffering that is merely contingent, visited on us without explanation, is unendurable. But if we inflict it on ourselves we can understand it, and extend our understanding to the whole of life.

(Michael Tanner, Nietzsche, Past Masters, ed. Keith Thomas [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994], 73 [paraphrasing Nietzsche])

Keith,

Judging by your unbounded enthusiasm for King [see here] it seems you don't know that he was actually a plagiarist. Even the text you lectured on (that "gave you chills") is lifted from other authors. The doctorate he "earned" was massively plagiarized, as seen from the conclusion of the committee at Boston University, which was appointed to look into the matter in 1991. Their decision is curious: "No thought should be given to the revocation of Dr. King's doctoral degree from Boston University," because he plagiarized "only" 45 percent of the first half of his dissertation and "only" 21 percent of the second.

You can find many other details in the book by Theodore Pappas, and here is a link to an instructive review of that book. No, Keith, don't worry, I don't expect you to publicize this on your blog (although I wouldn't mind). I just wanted to help you in your struggle to overcome remnants of your liberal prejudices.

Ian Trump

Twice, adv. Once too often.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

I lectured today on Dr Martin Luther King Jr (1929-1968). His "Letter from the Birmingham City Jail," composed and first published in 1963, is not only the most important document of the American Civil Rights Movement; it's a rhetorical and philosophical masterpiece. It gives me chills. During my reading of it this morning with my Ethics students, I was chilled several times. I see new things—allusions, parallels, tropes, arguments—every time I read it.

It's mind-boggling how much King accomplished in his thirty-nine years. He earned a Ph.D. degree from Boston University. He met with two presidents (Kennedy and Johnson), the Pope, and his idol, Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948). He received the Nobel Peace Prize. He wrote books. He traveled hundreds of thousands of miles a year giving speeches. He raised a family and ministered to his congregation. The world would be a much better place than it is—by any reasonable standard—if King had had a normal lifespan.

I can't say that I have always admired King. His religion, for example, is off-putting. But you can admire aspects of a person and even the whole person (i.e., the person all things considered) without admiring every aspect. If I had children, I would teach them about King's life and work.

A reader, Richard Jansen, just sent a link to this column by Charles Krauthammer. It's almost two years old, but I hadn't read it until a few minutes ago. Krauthammer has a different take on the liberal-conservative divide.

Today's link (see here for an explanation) is to Guide to Philosophy on the Internet, by Peter Suber.

Please read this column by Richard Cohen of The Washington Post. (You may have to create an account, but it's free and takes only seconds.) Cohen is incredulous that President Bush has widespread support among the American people, especially after recent events, such as the hearings of the 9-11 Commission. "Don't you see how stupid he is?" Cohen asks. "Don't you see how inarticulate he is?" "Don't you see how uncurious he is?" ("Uncurious" is the latest liberal epithet.) "How can you support, much less vote for, someone like that?"

Here's the subtext: If you support President Bush, for whatever reason, you're as stupid, inarticulate, and uncurious as he is. Bernard Goldberg has explained liberal bias in the media far better than I can. (See here, here, and here.) Liberals, he says, don't even realize that they're ideologues. They live in a hermetically sealed world of like-minded people who never question their dogmas. They think that their world is the real world and that anyone who rejects or questions it is an ideologue or fanatic. Could this be why liberals resort to name-calling and manipulative rhetoric rather than taking the time to persuade rationally? They simply can't believe that anyone disagrees with them or sees things differently.

Perhaps one day liberals will regain the capacity to reason. I welcome that day, because I believe in rational discourse. I'm not holding my breath.

I read your recent article ["Explaining Liberal Anger"] and was struck almost immediately by the following: "The first thing you must realize is that liberals have a program. They are visionaries. They envision a world in which everyone controls the same amount of resources."

Shouldn't that be "some liberals"? Do ALL liberals envision such a world? Pretty sloppy use of a universal, for someone who allegedly teaches logic. Academic standards aren't what they once were, I suppose.

Here is another: "Deep down, liberals deny that anyone is responsible for anything." If this is so, then how come so many liberals despise Bush as being responsible for starting an unnecessary war in Iraq? The mere fact that so many liberals are blaming the neo-con warhawks at the Pentagon for fueling the war frenzy is an obvious rebuttal of this claim; but there are many, many more. If liberals lacked the notion of responsibility, then they would also lack the concept of blame, which is obviously not the case.

I submit that if you are just going to write nonsense you at least have the decency not to post your supposed academic credentials along with them. You make philosophers as a whole look plainly stupid when you make such basic mistakes. A conservative's Bertrand Russell you are not. I won't bother taking apart any more than this—it was painful enough just allowing these blatant clunkers to come crashing through my mind. I can safely say that everyone who has read that article has been made dumber for having read it—except perhaps the willing swine eager to inhale this swill, whose intelligence level probably stayed right where it is.

Surely there are intelligent critiques of "the liberals" that can be constructed. What you have shown here, if anything, is that you can't be bothered doing the work it takes to make them.

Thomas W. Kerner
Washington, D.C.

As someone who also would describe himself as a former liberal, I must say that your description of liberals [see here] goes beyond being totally asinine, it is imbecilic.

A definition of comparable stupidity would be to describe a conservative as someone who thinks that everyone gets exactly what he/she deserves, and that it is morally wrong to help anyone since that would mean that he/she is getting more than he/she deserves.

Michael Moore no doubt would agree. Is that really who you want identified as your opposite number?

Sincerely,

Gene Salorio

Dear Mr. Burgess-Jackson,

I came across your article "Explaining Liberal Anger" on the Internet, and I have to say it is laughable!

(Is that what passes for academic scholarship at a Texas University?)

I am not a US "liberal," but I don't know any US liberals calling for the abolition of wealth and privilege in the United States.

Not even the communists in China are preaching against capitalism . . . have you not heard yet, that capitalism has blown communism out of the water?

Your attempted analysis and criticisms of US "liberalism" are old, hackneyed, "conservative" cliches and fantasies about "liberalism."

Your statements are essentially incompetent.

Sincerely,

Michael Schmitt
New Jersey, USA

To the Editor:

Re "Going Early Into That Good Night" (Arts & Ideas pages, April 24):

I teach a course on the social history of rock 'n' roll. Buried in your article about poets dying younger than other writers is a statistic that confirms what I tell my students: if you want to die young, become a rock musician!

Musical entertainers have an average life span (57 years) shorter than that of poets, novelists, playwrights or nonfiction writers.

Since rock music emerged as a popular musical form only in the mid-1950's, it will be a few decades before a life-span study of such musicians can be done. I am confident that rock musicians will show the shortest life span of any profession, given their proclivity for alcohol, smoking, drug abuse and other life-shortening activities.

Perhaps this reflects the kind of people who become rock musicians: risk-takers.

RICHARD SORRELL
Lincroft, N.J., April 24, 2004
The writer is a professor of history at Brookdale Community College.

We know we must die; we would rather not, but why must we suffer angst, engage in theatrics and create myths for ourselves. Why not simply face it and get on with the living of our lives?

(Kai Nielsen, "Death and the Meaning of Life," chap. 13 in The Meaning of Life, 2d ed., ed. E. D. Klemke [New York: Oxford University Press, 2000], 153-9, at 155 [essay first published in 1978])

My twentieth Tech Central Station column, "Explaining Liberal Anger," is up. See here. I'm being inundated with e-mail, most of it laudatory but some of it, well, angry.

Hi Keith,

This [see here] is a topic that is close to my concerns at the moment. Australia exports tens of thousands of live sheep to the Middle East every year. Last year, one shipment was refused by Saudi Arabia, and 58,000 sheep spent months at sea, without room to move and in temperatures around 100 degrees. Thousands died. Refusal of shipments is fairly common (of course, the sheep certainly suffer even when all goes to plan; some sheep are too stressed to eat, and starve to death). Information here.

Here's where religion comes in: the sheep are destined to be slaughtered by Muslims performing a religious duty. You write that no religion requires meat eating. True, so far as I know. But some religions require killing: Islam, and also Santeria (see P. Casal, "Is Multiculturalism Bad for Animals?" Journal of Political Philosophy [March 2003]). The shipments are refused because apparently the Koran requires that the sheep be in good condition: obviously, that's hard to guarantee when they're shipped from Australia. This is a big debate at the moment in Australia (I'm addressing the Australian Veterinary Association annual conference on the topic). Of course, I want the sacrifices stopped. But I think given the mutual mistrust between Islam and the West right now, this has to come from their side. We can only hope. . . .

cheers,

Neil

Dr Neil Levy
Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics
University of Melbourne
Parkville, 3010
Australia

For a masterful analysis of the concept of bullshit by a master philosopher, Harry G. Frankfurt, see here. As my teacher Joel Feinberg put it, "Conceptual clarification is the most distinctively philosophical of enterprises" (Joel Feinberg, Harm to Others, vol. 1 of The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law [New York: Oxford University Press, 1984], 17). I would go further and say that it's the only philosophical enterprise. Philosophy just is conceptual analysis. This week I discuss Frankfurt's classic essay with the students in my Seminar in Research Methods and Philosophical Writing. I could have chosen any of a number of essays, including many by Feinberg (see here). I chose Frankfurt's, and that ain't no bullshit.

Two great philosophers (and conservatives) were born on this date: David Hume in 1711 (old-style calendar) and Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein in 1889.

Here is the final paragraph of Andrew Sullivan's column about Bob Woodward's new book, Plan of Attack:

Which brings one to the real winner of this book: the president. As in the previous book on the Afghanistan war, "Bush at War," the president emerges in this book as a shrewd, fair, diligent, decisive and moral man. He asks the right questions. He makes the tough calls. I have no problem with someone with Bush's responsibility praying as he makes those calls. And reading the book makes me admire this man's calm under fire and composure under immense pressure. Which is, of course, what Bush wants me to believe. And it's what Woodward, in classic form, has delivered.

Exactly. How often have you heard it said—as a criticism—that President Bush sees things in black and white, good and evil? Thank goodness! Americans are tired of waffling, weaseling, nuancing, parsing, hemming, hawing, and vacillating. We have a president with character, values, conviction, and judgment. There's a place for nuance in the moral life, but not when it comes to the security of the American people. Evil is evil. It must be confronted. Come election day, Americans will have to decide what they want: a modern president or a postmodern president.

Democrats are terrified by Ralph Nader. See here. The more they attack him, the more they alienate the tens of thousands of Nader supporters who admire and respect him. I love it. Go Ralph!

By the way, I'm tired of hearing that, contrary to what Ralph says, there are fundamental differences between President Bush and John Kerry. From Ralph's point of view, both parties are beholden to corporate interests. This is his main concern. He isn't saying that the parties are alike in all respects. He's saying that on the most pressing issue facing the country today, there's little or no difference. Ralph is a populist. The Democrat party is not a populist party. It's the party of powerful, entrenched left-wing interests—what we might call professional do-gooders.

Is America ready for a klutz in the White House? See here.

The Portland, Ore., branch of the Independent Media Center—one of the most virulent Angry Left Web sites around—has a page devoted to the death in combat last week of Pat Tillman, the pro football player turned Army Ranger who died in combat in Afghanistan last week. This is offensive stuff, so you might want to skip it, but we think it's worth shining a light on. The page begins with a Washington Post story about Tillman's death under the headline (Indymedia's, not the Post's) "Dumb Jock Killed in Afghanistan." This is followed by reader comments. A sampling (quoted verbatim except for expletives):

"Tillman chose to go to Afghanistan. He's partially reponsible for the deaths of hundreds, maybe thousands of Afghan civilians. No need to feel sorry for him, other than feeling bad that he was brainwashed into serving as a grunt."

"it's amazing the kind of attention this insignificant incident is going to cause. well, he was rich, white, and an american. 10,000 (brown) iraqis get killed, and it barely merits a mention in the american news. how utterly f---ing sad."

"To be honest I wish I could feel sorry for the guy, but the truth is I really feel nothing at all. To many have died and too much money has flowed into the pockets of Dick Cheney to even worry about it."

"if he 'sacrificed' anything it was his common sense. He had a good American thing going and blew it."

In fairness, not all posters agree. "I'd like to correct the ridiculous headline that preceeds [sic] this story," writes one: "Brave American sacrifices friends, family and fortune in defense of his country. Pigs on IndyMedia can now continue to exercise free speech, sacrifice nothing and spew hate."

Today's link is to a collection of philosophical materials compiled by Douglas W. Portmore: "Portmore's Annotated Guide to Philosophy on the Internet." See here.

Given the leftist ideology that prevails on college campuses, we should use the expression "higher indoctrination" rather than "higher education." It's disgraceful. This essay by philosopher John Kekes should be required reading for every administrator, instructor, staff member, and student in every college and university across the land. I've been a college student or a professor for almost twenty-nine years. What Kekes describes is true.

Grammar, n. A system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for the feet of the self-made man, along the path by which he advances to distinction.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

To the Editor:

Your April 22 front-page article regarding the rising numbers of students from higher-income families at American colleges and universities misses a very basic point.

Sure, the children of the wealthy have advantages. But the children of successful parents are more likely to be successful not simply because their parents were wealthy but because their parents had the skills necessary to create that wealth. The parents did not inherit doctors' degrees; they earned them because they possessed intelligence and drive. Thus the odds that the children possess the same qualities and therefore are admitted to institutions of higher learning should be neither a surprise nor a negative.

STEVEN BECKER
New York, April 22, 2004

"Animals kill each other, so why can't we kill them?" Anyone who lectures on the moral status of animals, as I've been doing for twenty years (almost to the day), has heard this question dozens of times. It has a powerful appeal to certain minds. But it's thoroughly, almost ludicrously, confused.

Nobody doubts that animals kill each other. It's just that nothing of a normative nature follows from that fact. In general, that something is the case is no reason that it ought to be the case. This principle—that one cannot validly infer an "ought" statement from "is" statements—is known as Hume's Law, after the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776). (Some people mistakenly call it "the naturalistic fallacy," but that refers to something else.) Imagine a parallel argument: "People murder each other, so why can't I murder?" Pretty lame, eh?

Let's reconstruct the questioner's reasoning to make it valid. In other words, let's make it so that the conclusion follows logically from the premise(s). This will focus attention on the truth or acceptability of the premise(s). Perhaps the person who asks the question is reasoning as follows:

1. Predation is morally permissible.
2. When humans kill and eat other animals, they are preying.
Therefore,
3. It is morally permissible for humans to kill and eat other animals.

This reasoning would justify interspecific predation but not murder.

The problem with the reasoning is that the first premise is nonsensical. It has a false presupposition. To say that predation is morally permissible is to presuppose that the animals who engage in it are moral agents, capable of reasoning and acting on principle. No animal is a moral agent. Only humans are moral agents. Only humans, therefore, are morally responsible for their conduct. Predation is just a fact about our world. Those who engage in it are neither blameworthy nor praiseworthy.

It might be said that if no animal is a moral agent, then no animal has moral status. But moral status comes in two forms: moral agency and moral patienthood. Children are moral patients, but not moral agents. The severely retarded are moral patients, but not moral agents. The senile are moral patients, but not moral agents. Are we to cast these individuals out of the moral community because they cannot reason or act on principle? To be a moral patient, one needs only interests, and animals clearly have interests, the main one being in not suffering.

There's also a relevant difference between humans and animals that undermines the analogy. Humans don't need animal flesh in order to survive. Many animals (the carnivores) do. (Humans are omnivores, not carnivores.) Even if animals were moral agents, and therefore morally responsible for their conduct, it would not follow from the fact that they kill and eat each other that humans may follow suit. In the case of animals, it's self-defense (which is not to say that they think in those terms). They kill to survive. They have no choice. Humans don't need to kill animals to survive. We have a choice.

At this point it might be said that something has to die for another thing to live. This is true, but, as I argued a week ago (see here), there are morally relevant differences between animals and plants. Both are alive, but only animals can suffer, and suffering is intrinsically bad. Humans must eat. Nobody denies that. They do not have to add to the world's suffering in order to do so.

Isn't it odd that the people who ask the question posed at the outset don't look to the animal world for moral guidance in other areas? If we're to emulate animals with respect to diet, why shouldn't we emulate them with respect to habitat, reproduction, child-rearing, hygiene, social structure, and other matters? Let's not be selective! I suspect that people who ask the question aren't thinking clearly and carefully. They're groping for a reason to continue eating meat.

The peace party today cannot be explained by age, income, or education. In a Gallup analysis of polls conducted in January and March of 2003, majorities regardless of age, income, or education supported the war, though not in equal numbers. One exception to this picture is that large numbers of people with advanced degrees tended to be implacable opponents of the war. Schooling does not make a difference, unless you have acquired a lot of it. Indeed, postgrads are one of the most reliably liberal groups in America today. But there are large differences in support and opposition to the war that center on political party, ideology, and race.

Democrats were twice as likely to oppose the war as Republicans, and blacks were more opposed to it than whites by almost the same margin. Taken as a whole, women were somewhat more opposed than men, though this difference varied depending on whether the women had children, worked, or lived in rural areas. Mothers were less opposed than other women, and stay-at-home mothers were less opposed than working ones.

Party differences have deepened over the years. In a recent paper delivered at Princeton University, political scientist Gary Jacobson noted that, before the terrorist attacks of September 11, the gap between Democratic and Republican support of President Bush was wider than it has been for any prior president, including Bill Clinton. Before September 11, 88 percent of self-identified Republicans supported Bush; only 31 percent of self-identified Democrats did. This 57-point gap was the largest Jacobson had ever found. After September 11, support for President Bush sharply increased, but the gap in party attitudes toward Iraq remained sharp. In March 2003, 57 percent of liberal Democrats opposed military action against Iraq while 95 percent of conservative Republicans supported it.

(James Q. Wilson and Karlyn Bowman, "Defining the 'Peace Party,'" The Public Interest [fall 2003]: 69-78, at 71-2)

Dear Keith

I was a bit disappointed that despite all your usual appeal to reason, argument, and your declared opposition to purely emotional responses you reacted so angrily today [see here] just because someone dared not to like your blog. You refer to a philosopher colleague as "some idiot" who does "not know how to read," but you don't so much as address his reasons for criticizing you (and you even manage to misrepresent his comments). He may be wrong, of course, but why the rage? Hey, relax, if somebody posts a mildly negative opinion about your website, it's not the end of the world!

Ian Trump

I just posted an item about pâté de foie gras over at Animal Ethics. See here.

I know Peg Kaplan loves playing bridge, which sometimes takes her out of town, but she needs to stay close to her keyboard. Here is her latest batch of blog entries. The one on the United Nations is especially good. I may write something on that topic soon.

Steve from Iowa (see here for his blog) suggests that I add a comments section. I've addressed this before, but let me say more. In effect, I have a comments section. But your comments must go through me. I try to post at least one letter a day (in my "From the Mailbag" feature). The letters are lightly edited. It may seem as though I post only flattering letters, but I don't receive many unflattering ones. I would not hold back on posting a nasty or unfavorable letter to make myself look good. You know me better than that. Didn't I post many letters from Dr Leonard S. Carrier, with whom I disagree about the morality of war in Iraq?

I realize that comments sections are common in the blogosphere, but I prefer the newspaper model. Letters come in; some get selected for publication. Letters, to be published, should be well-written, well-reasoned, topical, and interesting. Don't be disappointed if your letter doesn't get published. Many of the letters I write to newspapers don't get published. Hell, some of my scholarly essays don't get published! This is the sort of disappointment one must learn to live with. Rest assured that I read every letter received. I appreciate your readership. Without you, this blog would be a diary. There's nothing wrong with that, of course.

By the way, you may have noticed that there are recurring features on this blog. I decided to post "Texasisms" on Fridays, "Who Says Scholars Are Humorless?" on Saturdays, "Peeves" on Sundays, and "Confusions and Fallacies About Animals" on Mondays. Why these days? Because they make up my weekend. (I teach on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, so I have four-day weekends.) During the summer, when I have no teaching or service responsibilities, I may add additional features.

While I'm discussing the mechanics of this blog, I might add that I try to do several things each day. First, I post a quotation from some book or article that I'm reading (or have read). The aim is to pique your curiosity. Second, I post a quotation from Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary. I hope you enjoy his wit and cynicism as much as I do. Third, I post a letter from either The New York Times or The Dallas Morning News, which are the two newspapers I read every day. I read the online edition of the former and the print edition of the latter. Fourth, I post a letter from a reader. (See above.) Fifth, I post something philosophical that I have written.

Remember: Although the blog is named "AnalPhilosopher," it has never been purely philosophical in nature. As I say in the sidebar to the left, it is "Analytic Philosophy (and Other Stuff) in the Anal-Retentive Tradition." Some idiot named Brian Weatherson commented early on (see here) that there wasn't much philosophy (or good philosophy) on my site. He must not know how to read. Keep in mind, too, that the philosophical material I post is not necessarily up to scholarly standards. My blog entries are the equivalent of drafts. Some of them are little more than brainstorming pieces, designed to elicit feedback or solidify my thoughts. I hope my philosophical colleagues keep that in mind. If you wouldn't judge Bertrand Russell's philosophical work by his talks on the BBC, you shouldn't judge my philosophical work by what appears on this blog.

Think of it this way. I'm an analytic philosopher. I'm not an engineer, an artist, a plumber, or a scientist. My philosophical training affects how I see things, how I understand things, how I speak, and how I write. Whatever I write about in this blog, whether it's bicycling, politics, animals, religion, running, morality, music, photography, or baseball, is seen through a philosophical lens. If you like looking at things philosophically (or anal-retentively), you may find my blog interesting. If not, you may not. Thank goodness there are other blogs for your perusal!

Today's link is The Philosophers' Magazine Online, which is the Internet version of a print publication.

Carnivorous, adj. Addicted to the cruelty of devouring the timorous vegetarian, his heirs and assigns.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

How many times have you heard an athlete thank God for his or her victory? I've heard it hundreds of times. But think about it. If God wanted A to win, then God wanted A's competitors to lose. If God helped A win, then God helped A's competitors lose. Why would God care whether the Boston Red Sox beat the New York Yankees or whether Gail Devers wins a sixty-meter dash? But there they are, giving God credit.

I don't mean to be disrespectful or uncharitable. Perhaps what these athletes are trying to say is that they thank God for (1) creating them, (2) sustaining them, and (3) giving them the capacity to compete. But if this is what they mean to say, they should say it whether they win or lose, not just when they win. By saying it only when they win, they imply that God is interested in such things as who wins a contest. I'm an atheist, but I like to think that if I'm wrong and there is a god, he or she will be concerned with more important things.

Keith:

Each year of life necessitates decisions. We all do the best we can with what we are given and the years of decision-making lead to the naturally egotistical conclusion that our decisions have been RIGHT. Our opinions are CORRECT. Our judgments (on the whole) SOUND. This is the human condition. MY brain has sorted through the debris of life and has distilled truth. It is in this Field of Dreams that we all gather. Thus opinions are firmly held because they represent the products of a lifetime. Yet despite this we all seem convinced that OUR arguments, skillfully offered in JUST the right tone or order or nuance can somehow convince others that THEIR decisions and opinions are incorrect! The supposition is that WE have been able to ferret out truth and wisdom with our years while the OTHER guy has not. In my experience, this wall is impenetrable (just like the FBI and CIA wall . . .). My socialist friends will remain forever socialist. A lifetime spent attempting to dissuade has been for naught. We exist realizing certain areas of discussion are best left alone. But I go to bed each night struggling to find JUST the right argument to crack their safes. The ONE magic potion that will "set them free." The door that will finally swing open for them. In a word, pathetic! Most of us "enlightened" folks face others of equal "enlightenment." Socialists put heads to pillows each night trying like the devil to turn capitalists away from their folly. So in the end, one wonders (after we all put on a few years . . .) just how futile the debate is? My closest friends—friends I'd call on for help and KNOW it would be coming, friends I'd trust my life with—will go to their graves convinced we should share and share alike. My fumes of capitalist rhetoric blow away with yesterday's breeze. It ends with my penciling "It's Hopeless" on my CATO membership check each year.

Best,

Will Nehs
Oconomowoc, WI

To the Editor:

If American undergraduates are staying away from science and technology, as Thomas L. Friedman says (column, April 22), it may not be for lack of government support. As a second-generation technology worker now looking for a job, I would discourage any student from seeking his or her fortune there.

My father's career in chemistry didn't get him all the way to retirement, although he made a decent finish as an expert witness and insurance consultant. Despite broad experience, demonstrated adaptability and up-to-date skills, it doesn't look as if I can get 10 more years' work in computer programming.

Technology educations are expensive, and careers may not be long enough. Better to do something you love—and be prepared for the downside if that love is science or technology.

JOSEPH A. MARTIN
Chelmsford, Mass., April 22, 2004

It is sickening and dismaying, but many still imagine that Nietzsche's central message was a sermon in praise of ruthlessness. (And this thirty-three years after the publication of Kaufmann's translation!) That distortion of Nietzsche may give some adolescent emotions a quick flaring rush, yet it may also be a devious tactic, for nothing makes it easier to dismiss Nietzsche than to first transform him into a crude boor. All the same, it is a travesty.

(Frithjof Bergmann, "Nietzsche's Critique of Morality," in Reading Nietzsche, ed. Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988], 29-45, at 44)

[A]n institution which has an internal aim may also have an external value. Consider friendship. The internal aim of friendship is the well-being of someone loved, but its benefit is greater than that. What friends desire is only a part of what they achieve. They achieve, for example, a reciprocal affection, and their own security. But they do not aim at what they achieve, for that would be to treat the other as a means, and so to deny the spirit of friendship. Likewise people will achieve education only if they desire it for its own sake. But what they achieve will be far more than that. They will acquire the ability to communicate, to persuade, to attract and dominate. In any social arrangement, such abilities must be advantages; but education can never be pursued merely as a means to them, even if they are its natural consequence.

(Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism, rev. 3d ed. [South Bend, IN: St. Augustine's Press, 2002], 142)

To the Editor:

David Brooks ("Clearing the Air," column, April 20) suggests that the Bush administration "could have moved aggressively to find another way forward" when it became clear that the Kyoto treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions "was never going to be ratified by the Senate."

In fact, under President Bush's policies, the United States is leading the world in initiatives to curb the growth of greenhouse gas emissions, particularly in the development of new energy technologies that will also reduce America's dependence on foreign oil.

These efforts include developing hydrogen fuel technologies designed to replace gasoline with pollution-free hydrogen; carbon sequestration technologies to remove greenhouse emissions from coal and other fossil fuels; efforts to make nuclear power, which produces no greenhouse gases, safer and more economical; research into nuclear fusion as a power source for the future; the FutureGen project to develop a coal-fired power plant that emits no pollutants or greenhouse gases; and incentives to expand the use of renewable energy sources like wind and solar.

SPENCER ABRAHAM
Secretary of Energy
Washington, April 22, 2004

Colin Jones, "The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisement, the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Origins of the French Revolution," American Historical Review 101 (February 1996): 13.

Roger F. Friedman, "It's My Body and I'll Die If I Want To: A Property Based Argument in Support of Assisted Suicide," Journal of Contemporary Health Law and Policy 12 (fall 1995): 183.

Eric B. Easton, "Closing the Barn Door After the Genie Is Out of the Bag: Recognizing a 'Futility Principle' in First Amendment Jurisprudence," DePaul Law Review 45 (fall 1995): 1.

James West Marcovitz, "ronald@mcdonalds.com—Owning a Bitchin' Corporate Trademark as an Internet Address—Infringement," Cardozo Law Review 17 (September 1995): 85.

Pamela S. Karlan, "Still Hazy After All These Years: Voting Rights in Post Shaw Era," Cumberland Law Review 26 (1995): 287.

Dear Dr. Burgess-Jackson,

Excuse the intrusion, but I read your blog when I was updating mine. I wanted to try and address your query on Vegemite [see here]. Vegemite is available at the Whole Foods Market in Dallas. I've never been to the one in Arlington but they most likely carry it there. It is a lot more expensive here in the US but that's just a fact. They also carry Marmite which is the UK version of the yeast extract with a different texture and taste, but many claim it's something altogether different.

I returned from Australia a couple of months ago with a large jar of Vegemite in my luggage. I enjoy it and will likely have to go to Whole Foods and buy more when my big jar runs out. I've also seen it at a UK specialty foods store on Lower Greenville in Dallas.

There are many recipes on their website. It smells bad but is very nutritious. It contains a very high concentration of B vitamins which I found useful to combat some of the effects of hangovers while I was in Australia.

I like it on toast, that's about all I can tell you.

Good Luck,
Troy

Ansel Easton Adams died on this date twenty years ago. Here is what I wrote in my journal:

Ansel Adams, a famous photographer who took pictures of such landmarks as Yosemite National Park and Sequoia National Park, died today at the age of eighty-two. I remember going to the Detroit Institute of Arts with my brother, Gary, a couple of years ago to see an exhibition of Adams's works. They were beautiful. I especially liked his portrait of Yosemite Valley during a winter storm. It was breathtaking. One of these days I want to go to the Center for Creative Photography here at the University of Arizona, where many of Adams's photographs are housed. He apparently spent a lot of time in Tucson just prior to his death. I just love black and white photographs of nature.

Everyone seeks immortality. Some achieve it through procreation. Some achieve it though faith. Some achieve it through their works. Adams left a magnificent body of work.

This tells you everything you need to know about the Left. (Thanks to The Argus [Nathan Hamm] for the link.)

Tim Peck helped me find my missing Show Desktop icon. (See here.) It wasn't where he said it would be, but the path he specified gave me enough information to conduct an effective search. The icon was in the System subfolder of the Windows folder of the C: drive. I dragged the icon to the quick-launch toolbar, where it used to reside. Thanks, Tim!

With all due respect, when I read your entry on Vegemite [see here] I thought you were joking. Vegemite is an Australian staple that hasn't really caught on anywhere else, and speaking from personal experience I find it utterly gross. But then, it's one of those things where you either love it or hate it.

Charity

I know that animals do many things better than we do, but this does not surprise me. It can even be used to prove that they act naturally and mechanically, like a clock which tells the time better than our judgement does. Doubtless when the swallows come in spring, they operate like clocks. The actions of honeybees are of the same nature; so also is the discipline of cranes in flight, and of apes in fighting, if it is true that they keep discipline. Their instinct to bury their dead is no stranger than that of dogs and cats which scratch the earth for the purpose of burying their excrement; they hardly ever actually bury it, which shows that they act only by instinct and without thinking. The most that one can say is that though the animals do not perform any action which shows us that they think, still, since the organs of their bodies are not very different from ours, it may be conjectured that there is attached to these organs some thought such as we experience in ourselves, but of a very much less perfect kind. To this I have nothing to reply except that if they thought as we do, they would have an immortal soul like us. This is unlikely, because there is no reason to believe it of some animals without believing it of all, and many of them such as oysters and sponges are too imperfect for this to be credible.

(René Descartes to the Marquess of Newcastle [William Cavendish (1593-1676)], 23 November 1646, in The Correspondence, vol. 3 of The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham et al. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 304)

Steve Headley, a.k.a. Texas Conservative, is in Holland, where bicycles rule. See here for his report, replete with photographs. Thanks for the report, Steve! Now I see why Holland produces so many top-notch bicyclists. Of course, we Texans have the one at the very top (see here). When you think about it, Texans are at the top of most lists. The most powerful person in the world is a Texan. He wasn't born here, but, like me, he got here as soon as he could.

Every year I do a bike rally in Italy, Texas, which is located forty-two miles south of downtown Dallas (as the crow flies). Naturally, when I began going there in 1990, I pronounced the town's name "it-a-lee," with three syllables and stress on the first syllable. That's how the name of the European nation is pronounced in the United States. (See the Oxford American Dictionary [New York: Oxford University Press, 1980], 352.)

But several years ago, I read that residents of the Texas town pronounce its name "it-lee," with two syllables and stress on the first syllable. While I haven't talked to many locals, I have heard it pronounced this way, so I assume that what I read is correct. Interesting, eh? (No, I'm not Canadian.)

Now I'm wondering about something else. If I were describing my friend Maurizio Mori, who attended graduate school with me at The University of Arizona before returning to his native Italy (the nation), I would say "i-tal-yan," with stress on the second syllable. (See the OAD.) Residents of Italy, Texas, must say "it-lee-an." It's a shame if they don't, for it would be illogical. I'll try to find out this summer. I'll stop on main street if I have to. Better yet, I'll hit the Dairy Queen.

To the Editor:

Regarding your April 16 editorial "Pork, Sweet and Sour," concerning the spending habits of Congress:

Both liberal Democrats and so-called conservative Republicans have given up balancing the budget. Only Senator John McCain and a few others are seriously fighting the deficit. Everyone else believes that the best way to grease the wheels of re-election is to load up on billions of dollars' worth of pork-barrel projects.

Democrats and Republicans have morphed into one inside-the-Beltway party. Their philosophy is to continue to increase spending above the rate of inflation. Liberals won't say no to social welfare programs. Conservatives love any military spending. Both support corporate welfare subsidies. They are leaving the next generation an inheritance of government debt in the trillions of dollars.

No wonder a majority of Americans stays home on Election Day. We need the silent majority to vote this November.

LARRY PENNER
Great Neck, N.Y., April 18, 2004

Immoral, adj. Inexpedient. Whatever in the long run and with regard to the greater number of instances men find to be generally inexpedient comes to be considered wrong, wicked, immoral. If man's notions of right and wrong have any other basis than this of expediency; if they originated, or could have originated, in any other way; if actions have in themselves a moral character apart from and nowise dependent on, their consequences—then all philosophy is a lie and reason a disorder of the mind.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

I understand your sentiment [see here], but here are a few points:

• Surely we should not stay in Iraq for 5-25 years as an occupying power, but since we took the proper action and deposed a dictator, we should spend enough time to give the Iraqis a chance at building their nation. I understand that we plan on transferring sovereignty this year. Our troop levels and basing rights after that transition should be determined as a result of a treaty between the US and the new, imperfect Iraq. It is of enormous strategic value to the US to have bases in Iraq, analogous to the bases we maintained in Europe during the cold war.

• If our departure from Iraq has the appearance of a withdrawal under pressure, similar to Spain's recent action, the consequences will be disastrous. I do not fear another Saddam so much as another Afghanistan—a failed state that was a safe harbor for terrorists.

• If it appears that Iraq will not be stable enough to transfer power to as a state, rather than simply exit, we can instead actively support an independent Kurdistan (this involves playing real hardball with Turkey). The Kurdish people have demonstrated that they do deserve a state.

• If another Afghanistan rises from a failed Iraq, eventually we will have another September 11, only with WMD. Deep in my heart, I think that if this happens we will treat the people of the Middle East about as well as we treated the American Indians—decimate them, take everything they have, and lock the survivors up in reservations. I do not want this to happen. We have proven that we are capable of it, both technologically and morally, yet that seems not to have the proper deterrent effect. How can we change this?

Ben
Duluth, GA

No, I'm not talking about Elvis. A couple of weeks ago, the Show Desktop icon on my Windows XP toolbar took on a strange appearance, so I deleted it. Does anyone know how to get it back? I've searched my hard drive in vain.

I just finished reading Julian Baggini and Peter S. Fosl, The Philosopher's Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003). At the end of this book (which, by the way, I commend to you) is a list of Internet resources for philosophers. Each day or so, I'll visit one of the sites and link to it here in my blog. As I do so, I'll provide a permanent link on the left side. Thus, if you forget how to reach a site, you can get to it via AnalPhilosopher. Perhaps some of the sites to which I link will link to me in return.

Today's site is EpistemeLinks. Enjoy! (Thanks to Drs Baggini and Fosl for doing the legwork.)

Maybe I haven't been paying attention, but there's animosity between the cable-television and satellite-television industries. I don't mean competition, which is healthy; I mean animosity, which is destructive. The advertisements I've seen recently are downright mean. In an ad for cable television, actor Dan Aykroyd looks into the camera and says, "The dish is a disease." Satellite television is running ads featuring pigs, the implication being that cable television costs more. "Who let the pigs in? Whuh. Whuh." I think it's a variation on a popular song, although I never heard the original.

There must be a lot of money at stake for these mean-spirited tactics to be used. I can just hear executives from one of the industries saying, "We've got to hit these guys hard." The other industry takes it personally and responds in kind. The nastiness escalates. Come to think of it, this is what happened in American politics during the past two decades. (I date the meanness to the Bork nomination.) Think about the Democrat filibusters of President Bush's judicial nominees. This is unprecedented. Democrats are not even allowing the Senate to vote. What are the chances that the next Democrat president (eventually there will be one) will get his or her judicial nominees confirmed? Do you think Republicans will forget? They're elephants!

Our culture is becoming uncivil. Rational persuasion of the sort inculcated by philosophy had a chance before. It has no chance now. Adversaries and competitors are enemies. Fairness, honesty, and restraint are forgotten virtues. Honor and good sportsmanship have lost their meaning. The end justifies the means.

Bill Keezer over at Bill's Comments just sent a link to this essay from today's Wall Street Journal. Thanks, Bill!

Peggy Noonan is widely regarded as a stylish writer. She's also a sharp political analyst. Read this essay on President Bush and see for yourself.

James Taranto posted a link to this image on Best of the Web Today. Read the sign at the right. Don't you love liberals?

Has anybody eaten Vegemite? I haven't, but I want to. Where can I get some? I've never seen it in a grocery store. What does it taste like?

Bill Keezer is making a run for Rookie of the Year in blogging. See here for his latest posts, including one on robots. Keep up the good work, Bill! The readers will come. It takes time. Just as, in baseball, all you can do is hit the ball hard and hope it falls in, all you can do in blogging is keep the quality high and hope the word gets out.

I think that you need to have a contest for all of your anal-retentive readers to see who has the most anal quirk. [See here.] I, for example, un-staple the paperwork that accompanies the samples that I analyze if it is not neatly aligned, and re-staple it. It has been pointed out to me that this is a little out of the ordinary. Not that I've ever been counted in the ranks of the normal!

jan

To the Editor:

Re "The Lost Father," by Karen Spears Zacharias (Op-Ed, April 21):

This is not meant to be a justification for the Vietnam War. But I am the son of a naval officer killed in action in World War II. I did not spend my youth weeping and feeling sorry for myself. I did not join the 1960's pacifist crowd. I followed my dad to the Naval Academy and also served my time protecting the freedoms we enjoy.

There is, unfortunately, no better way to ensure our safety and freedom. My younger brother is trying, as an Episcopal priest, and those of us who serve in the military protect his right to do so.

ROBERT E. KUNKLE
Dallas, April 21, 2004

Dr John J. Ray, my polymathic friend Down Under, is in fine form today. He puts most bloggers to shame. See here for his latest cornucopia of wit, wisdom, erudition, and panache.

Friday April 16, 2004

HEY DUDE WHERE'S MY BUDDY!!!???

COME BACK HOME MICHAEL!!!

Ok Michael, you've had your realpolitik fling with ex-General Wesley Clark. Your endorsed Presidential candidate in the Democratic Primaries has withdrawn. It is time for you to come home, to join your buddies and resume your only genuine role which is that of defiance and resistance. Compliance and assistance with the Democrats does not accord with your past, your character, your bold writings and, most memorably, your long corrosive assaults on the Party that betrayed the working classes and plunged our country into corporate globalization. Remember, Michael, you're the flinty man from Flint, Michigan. You've never forgotten your roots. The heady Hollywood, Manhattan scene with the celebrities and Academy Awards have never gotten to your head but rather have gotten into your deserving pockets. How we all recall your standing before one billion people in Los Angeles at the televised Academy Awards in 2003 and, breaking the customary cant of the awardees, throwing the gauntlet down to George W. Bush and his "fictitious" war mongering.

Now the War has become a quagmire, with both Republicans and Democrats complicit (check the votes in Congress). The Draft may be on the way. So what are you doing going on the Al Franken Show very nearly breaking down when Al Gore (he of the pro NAFTA/GATT, anti-worker, regime-change, Iraq-bombing, lethal sanctions on half a million children Administration) called and thought you were apologizing. You have nothing to apologize for, Michael. Gore has a lot to apologize for—blowing the election he won in Florida and the country as a whole and for blowing, with Bill Clinton, the many opportunities the rich-booming Nineties and the collapse of the Soviet Union gave this country to turn a peace dividend into a pro-worker, pro-environment, pro-consumer and anti-poverty resurgence.

Come back and join our Presidential campaign, Michael. Talk to those "Reagan Democrats"—those 35% of union members who still vote Republican and against their own interests—as only you can. Michael, if you go pumping for the Democratic Party this year, just what are you going to say to the unemployed steelworkers near Sparrows Point in Maryland? To the megathousands of laid off textile and furniture workers in North and South Carolina? To the abandoned auto workers waiting and waiting near their empty factories that went to repressive countries? To the millions of blue-collar workers, who fought our wars, only to learn that the two parties won't fight for their company pensions and health insurance? Are you going to tell them how the Democratic Party pushed through the WTO, let their pensions erode or disappear, were too busy collecting checks from the corporate bosses to pay attention to the corporate crime wave that looted and drained trillions of dollars from millions of workers, their retirement and small investments? Will you tell them that the cowardly Democrats, who couldn't win the fewer elections they are now not losing without the labor vote, won't even mount a determined drive to repeal the notorious, union-blocking Taft Hartley Act?

How can you be free to be what you are, or to depress Bush's vote, to jolt into consciousness the moribund Democratic Party?

Hey Dude, join your real buddies! The ones you may be thinking about just don't fit either your message, your vision, or our website VoteNader.org.

Come back home Michael. The workers and the youth of America are looking for you.

Best regards,

Ralph Nader

P.S. Will you put this invitation on your website and see how your fans react to Michael Moore returning to the Nader 2004 presidential campaign? Patti Smith will reserve a big singing spot, for you, on the stage for the customary finale, PEOPLE HAVE THE POWER.

I'm not the only person who admires Ralph Nader while disagreeing with him on substantive matters. See here.

We had already been to the end of the bay which is perhaps the most extraordinary place on earth. Imagine a vast basin, whose depth in the centre is impossible to estimate, edged by great, steep, snow-covered mountains; not a single blade of grass can be seen on this immense rocky mass which Nature has condemned to perpetual sterility. I have never seen a single breath of wind disturb the surface of this water which is affected only by the enormous blocks of ice that fall quite frequently from five different glaciers, making as they drop a sound that echoes far into the mountains. The air is so clear and the silence so deep that the voice of one man can be heard half a league [1.5 miles] away, as can the sound of birds which have laid their eggs in the hollows formed by the rocks.

(Jean-François de Galaup de la Pérouse, The Journal of Jean-François de Galaup de la Pérouse: 1785-1788, trans. John Dunmore [London: The Hakluyt Society, 1994], vol. 1, p. 109 [c. 2 July 1786] [footnote omitted])

See also here and here.

Keith,

My first recommendation is to laugh, not cry. Secondly, I will say that you may take comfort in knowing that you, and your academic colleagues, are in good company.

I work for a very large, high-technology company which is supposedly full of lots of brainy white-collar type folks, most of whom have some level of college education. The average age at this company is likely (I don't know for sure) in the mid- to late thirties—so we are not talking about computer neophytes. The situation you describe happens here all the time.

The most common example stems from the fact that there are a number of professional and industry specific interest groups and, consequently, mailing lists. A message will go out to one of these lists and it will be followed by one of two emails:

Email #1: "Hey, this looks like a great list, does anyone know how I can get my name added?"

Email #2: "Hey, how the heck did I get on this list; please remove me asap."

Each of these then produces a flurry of these:

"Hey, doofus, quit hitting reply all."

"It's not a reply-all problem; it's what happens when you reply to a send mail."

"Stop replying to the replies because they just propagate more email."

"Stop replying to the replies replying to the requests to stop replying to the replies."

Etc.

Because it is a big company, we have thousands of emailers and big servers to handle all that traffic. Eventually, some sort of security thingy sees all the traffic and just shuts things down in an attempt to take a breather, or recover. In any case, email is then rendered useless for awhile.

So, despair not, it could be worse. I suggest just sitting back and having a good laugh—or send a reply!

Regards,
Steve

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. When I got home from school an hour or so ago, having bought groceries on the way, I fired up the computer. I had lots of e-mail messages (thirty, in case you're wondering what "lots" means). About ten of the messages were from fellow faculty members at The University of Texas at Arlington. Someone received a message from the university about spam and hit "Reply All" to respond. Since the original message had been sent to all addresses on the UTA system (or perhaps all professors and staff), the response went to everyone. That in itself is stupid. But it got worse. Other people chimed in! One person said, "I'm getting lots of spam, too." Another said, "What can we do about it?" A third said, "Do this." A fourth said, "Spam doesn't bother me; I just delete it." A fifth said, "Eudora cuts out a lot of spam." And so on. Finally, someone wrote to say, "Stop it! This is worse than spam!" It was indeed.

What is it with academics? Either they're lonely and love feeling connected to people by sending messages to strangers, or they're too stupid to realize that they're compounding the problem, or they think everyone else wants to listen to them complain. Sigh. Finally, someone from the UTA web team wrote to say it's an inappropriate use of the university's listserv. Apparently, complaints had begun to come in. Lest you think this is a peculiarity of people at my university, the same thing happened on a large scale a few months ago when someone—probably a spammer—commandeered the e-mail list of The American Philosophical Association. Messages came in for days from bewildered, frustrated philosophers. Do you see the irony? Dozens of people sent e-mail messages to hundreds of philosophers to complain about receiving dozens of e-mail messages from philosophers.

Talk, v.t. To commit an indiscretion without temptation, from an impulse without purpose.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Professor (or may I call you Keith?):

I began reading your blog, just skimming it, really. I found it so amazing, that I decided to go back through your archives and start at the beginning. I'm back in November, still . . . found it quizzical that, in one blog, you were throwing darts at an advertising slogan which read "Moderation is the invention of small minds," stating that [see here] moderation is the exercise of temperance . . . avoiding extremes. Yet, only a few blogs later (on the same day, actually), you were singing the praises of excellence [see here]. Could not excellence be construed as being extreme? Just a thought . . .

I do love the blog, and will continue reading through the thoughts and ideas you've written. Thank you for taking the time to share them with us all.

Johnna

Bill Keezer has posted some reflections on vengeance, retribution, justice, and mercy. See here.

To the Editor:

Re "A Passion for Poetry (and Profits): Charting a Literary Course With $100 Million" (Arts pages, April 19): As a poet who has benefited during her life from money dispensed by several foundations, I would prefer to live in a society with a progressive tax system, universal health care, adequate housing for people of modest income, a living minimum wage, social security and excellent public education (including the arts).

The selective dispensations of private foundation money can help sustain a few individuals and projects. But finally, the artist must grow, live and work within a society. A more just allocation of the resources of our society would be the true guarantor and benefactor of art.

ADRIENNE RICH
Santa Cruz, Calif., April 19, 2004

One manifestation (symptom) of my anal-retentiveness is a love of collecting, compiling, organizing, cataloguing, sorting, analyzing, and arranging. I enjoy these activities very much, just as some people enjoy gardening, woodworking, or playing bridge. A few years ago, I began compiling a chronological list of doctoral dissertations. Here is what I have as of today. The information is gleaned from Dissertation Abstracts Online, which is available to me from home (where I work) via my university's library. Obviously I haven't come close to compiling all dissertations, so don't be offended if yours isn't listed. (Feel free to provide information.) I began with fellow graduates of The University of Arizona, then moved on to colleagues, teachers, and famous people. Most of the people listed are philosophers, but you'll notice that Woodrow Wilson, Garry Wills, and Tom Osborne are on the list, too. (Note that I added a permanent link to this document on the left side of this blog. The document will be updated periodically.)

Donald Luskin has posted the program for the Democrat convention. See here.

Philosophers being philosophers, there is not a self-evident truth in existence that someone hasn't claimed isn't self-evident after all.

(Julian Baggini and Peter S. Fosl, The Philosopher's Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods [Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003], 207)

Dear Mr. Burgess-Jackson,

I should like to reply to your question/comment about troops in Iraq [see here]. Firstly, I do not know what conservative friends you have who might agree with your sentiment of pulling out troops—but they certainly are not that conservative. As you well know, the core conservative movement had always been against the war in the first place (some had been confused in the aftermath of Bush ascending power and the traumatic events of 9-11; most regained consciousness soon thereafter)—and they certainly are against a continued occupation. Reading The American Conservative these days, one could think that one has accidentally picked up The Nation. It is no coincidence that The American Conservative's Executive Editor (Scott McConnell) is a member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy that includes such odd bedfellows as Charles Kupchan (Georgetown University), Christopher Preble (CATO Institute), Steve Clemons (New America Foundation), et al.

It is—and I mean no offense—mostly ideological Republicans who staunchly defend the invasion and consequent occupation. There is also—and this is hardly conservative—the argument of "We are here now, we must stay . . . everything else would be dishonest—we'd ruin our reputation (whatever is left of it) in the Middle East entirely." This is actually a really good argument—the lack of trustworthiness has cost the U.S. too much already. It can be said simplistically that: The Russians, certainly the Turkish—and surely the Shiites did not support the invasion (liberation, war . . . whatever) as much (or at all) as they would have otherwise. Still, I agree for certain reasons, that the U.S. or even the U.N./NATO won't have much success staying in Iraq any longer.

I talked to a Prof. of History, Judaic Studies, and the Holocaust once about societies and when they subjectively feel as though they were entirely saturated with informers. We came up with a rough number of 4%. (One in every classroom of twenty-five, to simplify.) If 4% of potential snitches in a society can create the impression, feeling of fear, of constant danger of being arrested for making a critical utterance, than, I posit, how many percent of potentially violent resisters to the U.S. occupation do we suppose Iraq needs in order to make the country, fellow Iraqis and the assortment of troops in the country feel entirely unsafe and insecure?!? I suggest that a fraction of 1 percent needs to be willing to do so in utmost violent fashion—and no more than 5 percent need to consent, latently or actively. Such a situation is unbearable and unwinnable.

Well, actually, it isn't. It is winnable. Alas, the only way to deal with this situation in Iraq is to go from house to house and put a gun on the temple of every mildly suspected bastard and tell them to stop uprising, or else be shot—no questions asked. Sound familiar? Yes—more or less the tactics that Saddam Hussein had to employ at a point. Americans will be unwilling (rightly so) to employ such policies—in light of that (the film The Battle of Algiers comes in handy, in that regard), we have to ask ourselves: Have we got what it takes—in willingness and determination—to stay in Iraq? The answer, I think, is no. A few Iraqis will be willing to suffer more to get the U.S. out than the majority of the U.S. is willing to suffer to stay in. That 75 percent support the U.S. or don't mind the U.S. or say that they are better off than under Saddam Hussein (if it is even 75%) is not a number with which the administration should brag . . . usually chastising the "negative" media coverage . . . it is a number to be frightened of. 25% are not delighted? Holy shit—that should scare the bejeezus out of Bush, Rice, all of us! (It should also get Mr. Chalabi a prison sentence—but that's wishful thinking.)

So perhaps, despite the extremely damaging consequences, the U.S. should get out. Neither is a good option. Unfortunately, the foreign policy the U.S. has conducted with regard to Iraq has left us ONLY with bad choices. In that light, the invasion cannot be supported. Never mind that the argument that Saddam Hussein was a bad guy was never the argument for war (the old Bait & Switch), never mind that "Criminals must be punished" is not a sound tool of foreign policy, never mind the hypocrisy surrounding it, . . . never mind these ex post facto rationalizations: The problem is that the U.S. was coaxed into doing utmost harm to itself, engaging upon a highly un-American mission (George Washington's farewell address disregarded . . . shining as a bright light by way of EXAMPLE ignored). The problem is that leaving the Iraqis to themselves ("they don't deserve liberty if they botch it") created a problem that was not before. The Security Strategy of the United States spells out in black and white "that weak states, like Afghanistan, can pose as great a danger to our national interests as strong states." [http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nssintro.html] If anything, we created a weak state in Iraq—in my opinion a greater danger than a ruthless Hussein-ruled Iraq. If we are so casual about what will happen to them after "liberating them" ("don't deserve liberty"; "if they botch it, they botch it")—if we are so callous about how they will be ruled ("what if another Saddam Hussein rises to power? That could happen"). Why were we so concerned about Hussein killing "a few of his own" in the first place—and why was it worth jeopardizing the national security of the United States . . . not to speak of soldiers' lives?

In or out—the problem is grave. We can't unmake the invasion. If we've done the Iraqis "right" in ridding them of their tyrant, I do not know. Is it the U.S.'s business to do so? And how does that not transfer responsibility upon the U.S. for the aftermath? Must we not protect the very Iraqis we freed from a theocracy?

I'll grant the point that this situation looks—unfortunately—like it won't get resolved neatly. Iraq cannot be compared with Germany or Japan. On the other hand, the U.S. did stay in Germany for 50 years! The U.S. occupied (with allies) Germany for 4 years until the first election took place on a national level. Food for thought.

Warm regards,
Jens F. Laurson

What is it with Chris Matthews and Vice President Dick Cheney? I watch MSNBC's Hardball just about every evening. Its host, Matthews, has been hammering away at Cheney since before the war in Iraq began. Other Hardball targets are Paul Wolfowitz (Deputy Secretary of Defense), Douglas Feith (Under Secretary of Defense for Policy), and Lewis "Scooter" Libby (Chief of Staff for Vice President Cheney).

Tonight, Matthews peppered U.S. Senator John McCain (a frequent guest) with questions about the vice president. He (Matthews) kept implying that there is something wrong with the vice president having a policy-making role. McCain said there is nothing wrong with it. The president can run the White House as he (or she) sees fit. Some vice presidents have been out of the loop. Others, such as Cheney, are very much a part of the decision-making process.

My theory is this. Dick Cheney is a seasoned political veteran. He knows the journalistic game ("gotcha") and refuses to play it. Journalists hate his secretiveness (think of the lawsuit to force him to disclose whom he met with in formulating energy policy) and would love to bring him down. They also sense that he is contemptuous of them, which he is (and rightly so). Matthews in particular seems obsessed with Cheney. Watch Hardball and see for yourself.

Keith:

Indeed, I often ask my socialist/feminist friends (seems that's all I have . . .) if the world would be a better place sans testosterone? [See here.] Most hesitate sufficiently to imply their bent. At LEAST a diminution! I am deeply troubled by the lack of support for masculine attributes and what it portends. More importantly, perhaps, is the subconscious signal it sends and its ramifications. Will men come to resent women (causing more violence and resentment) as society stalks them from all directions seeking to separate them from their gonads? Or will men go gently into that good night? Best,

Will

A few years ago, I had an exchange with Ernest van den Haag in the pages of Criminal Justice Ethics (see here). It was an honor to engage him, although, to this day, I think he misunderstood my argument. Van den Haag's essay on capital punishment in the Harvard Law Review is, in my opinion, the best thing ever written on the topic. Please read it for yourself (here). Then read William F. Buckley Jr's moving tribute to van den Haag (here).

Peg Kaplan is back to her blog (see here) after playing bridge in Iowa for several days. We missed you, Peg. Get that laundry done. Maybe I can induce Peg to write about Mr Mollo.

Natural law philosophy sits in opposition to the liberal or humanist outlook that derives from both Kant and the British utilitarians. The sexual liberal justifies permissive sexual ethics by appealing to the values of pleasure and autonomy, while the natural law theorist justifies prohibitive sexual ethics by appealing to the design of nature to which human behavior ought to conform. If sexual acts are unnatural, contrary to nature (say, anal coitus, bestiality), they will be morally wrong, in this ethical system, just for that reason. To one standard list of reasons sexual acts might be wrong—they are dishonest, cruel, unfair, manipulative, coercive, exploitive, selfish, unfaithful, or negligently dangerous—Aquinas adds "unnatural." So, too, does Kant, who condemns a slew of sexual acts as crimina carnis contra naturam. Not so the utilitarian and many contemporary Kantians, for whom fellatio and cunnilingus, anal intercourse, mutual masturbation, and, for more radical Kantians, consensual sadomasochism, can be performed with "charity" and full respect between sexual partners.

(Alan Soble, Sexual Investigations [New York and London: New York University Press, 1996], 28 [italics in original; endnotes omitted])

To the Editor:

Re "Leader of Hamas Killed by Israel in Missile Attack" (front page, April 18):

Dr. Abdel Aziz Rantisi was a pediatrician who took the Hippocratic oath to nurture and preserve lives. Yet his avowed, single-minded purpose was terroristic destruction: the killing of Israelis whenever and wherever possible.

Israel's elimination of Dr. Rantisi was not only an act of self-defense, but it also made the world a better and safer place for everybody.

May our American forces have similar success in ending the scourge of Dr. Rantisi's counterpart who seeks to end Western civilization: Osama bin Laden.

JOEL E. ABRAMSON
New York, April 19, 2004
The writer is the president of Likud U.S.A.

Prof Burgess-Jackson,

Regarding this post, there is are several ways that a home run with the bases loaded may not be a grand slam. Each involves a runner being out for some reason.

1: A base runner passes another (the runner that does the passing is out).
2: A runner fails to touch a base and the defense successfully appeals.
3: A runner runs out of the baseline too far.
4: A runner failed to tag up after the previous fly/pop/foul out, but the defense waited until after the home run hitting batter to double him up.
5: A runner runs backwards (to the previous base) solely to taunt the other team.

A couple of those are rare indeed, but under any scenario one or more runners could be considered out, thus leaving three or fewer runners to score on that home run. This would not be a grand slam. However, if a grand slam is not defined by all four runners scoring on the home run (i.e., if a three-run grand slam is possible), you can ignore this email.

One of my favorite trivia questions that I've heard, and wish I could remember more accurately, is how many ways there are to legally come to occupy first base (something in the neighborhood of 18).

Adam
UT 2L

PS: I like your blog (except for the animal stuff), partly because we have somewhat similar histories. I went to UA for undergrad and came to TX for work (and now for law school). I'll be in Richardson for 6 weeks this summer and plan to catch several games at the Ballpark [in Arlington], although I just learned that I'll be an hour away in "good" traffic.

Here is how Paul Krugman begins today's New York Times column (see here):

"Yes, the republic is in danger," a friend said. "But what's going to happen to interest rates?" O.K., let's take a break from politics.

In other words, let's take a break from what Krugman usually writes about, politics, in which he has no expertise and therefore no authority, and talk about economics, in which he has expertise. How can anyone take this man seriously?

This may not sit well with my conservative friends, but I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that the United States should pull its troops from Iraq. This in no way undermines my belief that the war was justified. I believe toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein and punishing him for his horrific crimes was more than adequate as a justification. I'm a retributivist. Criminals must be punished.

But nation-building? That's another matter. We shouldn't be building nations. Deep in his bones, President Bush knows this. Indeed, he said as much during the 2000 presidential campaign. Let the Iraqis take over. If they botch it, they botch it. They will prove that they don't deserve liberty. I've heard estimates that the United States will be in Iraq for five to twenty-five years. That's too long. We should get out by the end of 2004, if not sooner.

Ah, you say, what if another Saddam Hussein rises to power? That could happen. We'll have to deal with it if and when it does. But it might not happen, and we needn't assume that it will. Our toppling of Saddam should have a deterrent effect on other tyrants, in and out of the Middle East. It's funny, because liberals justify punishment of everyday lawbreakers on grounds of deterrence, but when it comes to deterring murder on a mass scale, they lose sight of it. We done right by ridding Iraqis of their tyrant; now let's get out.

All the money I have saved I know just how I got it. It did not come to me in any mysterious way, and the reason I speak of this is that money got in this way stops longer with a fellow that gets it with hard knocks than it does when he finds it.

(William E. Story Sr to William E. Story 2d [his nephew], 6 February 1875, reprinted in Hamer v. Sidway, 124 N.Y. 538, 27 N.E. 256 [1891])

Convent, n. A place of retirement for women who wish for leisure to meditate upon the vice of idleness.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Jan Bussey, whom I met through this blog, is a terrific photographer. She just posted some of her latest images. See here and here.

Will Nehs sent a link to this story, which originally appeared in The New York Times. As you read it, ask yourself whether society would ever take steps to minimize male aggression by, for example, tinkering with male hormones. Don't laugh. We're closer than you might think. Some time back, a feminist asked whether men are cost-efficient. She seemed to think they might not be. After all, they perpetrate most of the violence, including wars. Even a good provider isn't worth that.

How many women these days view men as expendable? A woman who wants a child needn't commit to a man. She can raise the child on her own, or enlist the assistance of the state via welfare programs. Even sexual intercourse isn't necessary. Women can be artificially inseminated, like cattle, horses, and pigs. Perhaps one day there will be artificial wombs, which will obviate pregnancy. Children will be ordered the way one puts in an order for an automobile. "I'd like a sensitive, bookish, blond boy, please."

Men are coming to be seen as an inconvenience. Why put up with their slobbishness, violence, and incessant demands for sex? Perhaps one day there will be only a few male breeders—or rather, sperm producers, for they won't actually get to have sex. Women will choose the sperm they want based on the characteristics of the father and proceed to raise their children by themselves or in female collectives. Perhaps men will be retained to do physical labor, the way slaves once were.

I received the following letter from a reader:

Professor Burgess-Jackson:

Forthwith, I am no expert in the field of animal ethics. . . .

However, as a constant reader of your site, many of your posts prompt internal questions. The following came to mind upon reading your plant/animal dichotomy [see here], and since I've heard many make a similar point in regard to animal rights, I'll ask you (perhaps you could deal with it on your blog someday).

Where does one draw the line, and is the line arbitrary? I'm thinking here about insects. Surely, building one's home not only displaces but destroys many thousands of insects. Are we to take this issue weightily or lightly? Mosquitoes stinging us? Stepping on ants as we walk through the grass? Etc. I guess I'm asking whether insects have rights, and how far one may go before an ordinary swatting of a gnat away from one's ear deigns moral responsibility?

I think you get the point. Now, I'm honestly not offering this as an "argument" against your views—I would just like to hear something said about it. Surely, it seems to me, such considerations are stronger than the "plant" examples to which your interlocutors alluded?

One final request: could your answer entertain a non-utilitarian mode of argument? As a non-utilitarian, I am less likely to be convinced by such an argument (though I can readily see how the argument would be formed on utilitarian grounds).

Just food for thought.

Take care, Allan

Here is my reply:

19 April 2004, 2:15 P.M. Allan: The line is not arbitrary. If a being is sentient, it has moral status. There are two kinds of case: (1) those in which it is clear that the being is sentient and (2) those in which it is not clear that the being is sentient. Let's call these cases, respectively, "easy" and "hard." Cows, pigs, and chickens are easy cases. Insects and mollusks are hard cases. Let's not commit the fallacy of inferring the absence of easy cases from the presence of hard cases. In other words, from the fact that it's unclear whether insects are sentient, it doesn't follow that it's unclear whether cows, pigs, and chickens are sentient. As to your final question, I'm a deontologist. It's wrong to harm others. Suffering is a harm. So it's wrong to inflict suffering on others. You don't have to be a consequentialist (or, more particularly, a utilitarian) to think that suffering matters, morally. kbj

Keep those cards and letters coming!

It is astonishing how often plants come up in connection with animal liberation. Even intelligent people think that bringing animals into the moral community requires bringing plants in. Since it is absurd to think that plants have moral status, they say, it is absurd to think that animals have moral status. The assumption is that there are no morally relevant differences between animals and plants. Either both of them have moral status or neither of them has moral status. Since plants clearly do not have moral status, neither do animals.

The flaw in the reasoning is that there are morally relevant differences between animals and plants, differences that ground a difference in treatment. Animals (most of them, anyway; certainly those that are most often eaten) are sentient; plants are not. Both are living, to be sure, but nobody thinks that being alive is a sufficient condition for having moral status. Peter Singer doesn't. Tom Regan doesn't. I don't. You don't.

It might be said that plants are sentient, in the sense of having the capacity to suffer. There is no evidence for this. (Take my word for it. I wrote an essay entitled "Do Plants Have Rights?" for a graduate seminar many years ago, which required that I review the scientific literature.) The people who say it don't believe it, either. I often hear it said that plants have amazing abilities. They respond to all manner of environmental stimuli, from light to heat to magnetism to noise. But machines can be made to respond to environmental stimuli. Your thermostat isn't sentient. Your car isn't sentient. Your computer isn't sentient.

There is no reason whatsoever to think that plants can feel pleasure or pain. They lack brains and nervous systems. What good would a pain response do for an organism that can't move to avoid painful stimuli? Animals can avoid pain by moving; plants cannot. Evolutionarily speaking, it would be pointless for a plant to be sentient. It is not pointless for an animal to be sentient.

There is a great deal of intellectual dishonesty among those who deny animals moral status. They seem committed to thinking of and using animals as resources and will let nothing—not even logic and common sense—stand in the way. They ridicule those who take animals seriously. When they make the point about plants, they do so with an air of triumph. But the joke's on them. Those who think animals have moral status have thought things through to a much greater degree than those who don't. Take my word for it. I've been reading, writing, and talking about the issue for a quarter of a century.

If you sincerely believe that plants are sentient, act on your belief. You may think it shows that any living organism may be killed and eaten. What it actually shows, when you combine it with your belief that pain is intrinsically bad, is that you're acting wrongly. You should be foraging for plants and animals that died natural deaths, not raising and killing them for food. But suppose this were an inadequate diet. Then one would have to make comparative judgments about the degree to which various organisms suffer. Presumably, if plants were sentient, they would be less sentient than animals, so one would have an obligation to consume them rather than animals. Either way, it's wrong to eat animals.

To the Editor:

Howard Dean's call for Democrats to vote for John Kerry instead of Ralph Nader (Op-Ed, April 12) is telling. He does not address the many millions of Americans who do not identify with a political party, who consider themselves independent, or who, like me, consider themselves Green.

He may be right that exposing the abuses of right-wing ideologues is enough to win the presidency. But John Kerry is no champion of democracy or the working class. Perhaps Mr. Nader's candidacy will force Mr. Kerry to address some of the issues important to the future of this country, just as Dr. Dean's candidacy forced a reluctant Mr. Kerry to be critical of a disastrous Bush presidency.

ELI BECKERMAN
Somerville, Mass., April 12, 2004

Keith:

Yesterday I was in a crit[erium], a short course just over 1 km, 35 laps. I got in a breakaway about 5 laps in. Initially there were just three of us, but within a lap 4 more bridged up. I had a teammate. There were 2 guys from another team, and 3 guys from 3 other teams. We were hanging about 5-7 seconds ahead of the peloton. One guy wouldn't work. [See here.] So my teammate gave him a tongue lashing. Then my teammate gapped him off, jumped and got back in the group. So there were 6 of us that worked. Within about 5-7 laps, we got the gap up to 25". Some of the guys stopped working as hard, and the gap dropped to 17". I did a couple of hard pulls and within 5 laps we had the gap up to 35". With 10 to go, I was telling my teammate (a much better sprinter than I am) to take short pulls, and I would lead him out for the sprint. But he didn't. Also, starting the last lap I was at the front. 1/4 way around I pulled off, but then ended up 5th wheel. That was a mistake. In a crit there are 3 races. One to get in the right break. One to the last corner, and one to the finish. I did not win the race to the last corner. I came into the last corner 5th, and finished 5th. Not bad considering I am 46, there were 47 riders in the race, it was a Cat 3 (I am not cat 3, I have never upgraded from cat 5), and the 4 guys ahead of me were 10-25 years younger than me. Our average pace was just over 25 mph. My average heart rate was only 158.

I have a website now.

Eric Snider, Chair
Dept of Phil
Univ of Toledo

Quite at first I was in doubt as to whether he was a man of genius or a crank, but I very soon decided in favour of the former alternative. Some of his early views made the decision difficult. He maintained, for example, at one time that all existential propositions are meaningless. This was in a lecture room, and I invited him to consider the proposition: "There is no hippopotamus in this room at present". When he refused to believe this, I looked under all the desks without finding one; but he remained unconvinced.

(Bertrand Russell, "Ludwig Wittgenstein," Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, n.s., 60 [July 1951]: 297-8, at 297)

Here is a source for all things cycling, including great race reports. The Amstel Gold Race was held this morning in The Netherlands. It's the fourth of ten World Cup events, five of which are held in the spring and five of which are held in the fall. In between are the stage races, such as the Giro d'Italia and the Tour de France. See here for a full report on today's World Cup event. I watched a tape-delayed broadcast on OLN (the Outdoor Life Network) this afternoon. It was fabulous.

I changed the font on my Animal Ethics blog. Let me know what you think.

Dick McDonald sent a link to his blog, The Right Scale, which looks interesting. Thanks, Dick! I added a permanent link to the left side of this page.

Bill Keezer over at Bill's Comments has posted some interesting reflections on the soul. See here. I hope Bill will not be offended when I say that he is a philosopher. Not in the technical sense, but in the sense of a lover of wisdom. Keep up the good work, Bill. You have a beautiful soul.

I don't see how Smallholder can love on his cattle every day [see here] and then lead them to their death. That's like me taking my cats or dogs to the slaughterhouse after they sleep in the bed with me!

Maybe he could find another career that allows cow-petting and makes him a profit so he can cow-pet on a regular basis.

Mindy Hutchison

Ever heard the expression "Fixin' to," as in "I'm fixin' to mow my lawn"? I doubt that I ever heard it in twenty-six years of living in Michigan, but I hear it all the time in Texas. In fact, I've taken to saying it myself. The other day I was talking to my neighbor Johnny while walking Sophie and Shelbie. He had just mowed his lawn. "I'm fixin' to mow mine, too," I said. I didn't say it for effect; it just came out. It surprised me. Fifteen and a half years of living in this state has affected my speech. My friends would say it has affected my thinking as well. I agree: for the better.

Experience, n. The wisdom that enables us to recognize as an undesirable old acquaintance the folly that we have already embraced.

To one who, journeying through night and fog,
Is mired neck-deep in an unwholesome bog,
Experience, like the rising of the dawn,
Reveals the path that he should not have gone.
Joel Frad Bink.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

My aim [in this essay] was to show that some mediumistic communications do provide us with evidence for the continued existence of human personality after death. I am very far from claiming that this evidence is conclusive. But I think it is strong enough to justify the following piece of advice: 'Do not be too sure that you will not continue to exist as a person after your physical organism has died'. And even though we cannot go farther than that, the investigation of mental mediumship has taught us something which is quite important.

(H. H. Price, "The Problem of Life After Death," Religious Studies 3 [April 1968]: 447-59, at 459 [italics in original])

I have had it. We are giving al-Qaeda all it needs to energize its base. In efforts to politicize the 9-11 tragedy, to placate the families of the victims and the media's incessant search to lay the blame at someone's feet, we are publicly telling the terrorists of the world to stay the course and keep united. Then we tolerate the media and their shameful disrespect for the president on national television and certainly Osama is celebrating in the streets.

I truly feel for the pain of the victims' families and cannot say I know their pain. But photos of family members like that in Wednesday's Dallas Morning News front page of the mom wearing a victim's photo, while leering at the former FBI director as he testifies, have got to make Osama feel he has succeeded.

I trust this administration in the war on terror. It is unfortunate that countries like Spain so publicly cave even after the tragedy there. I wish that all free countries would unite and see that the only way to eradicate terror is for all of us to unite and have this enemy's face squarely in our sights.

Terror has shown that it doesn't hate people, it hates countries that embrace freedom.

David Leos, Highland Village

I hereby inaugurate a blog series, "Peeves." (The word is a back-formation of "peevish," and yes, I'm peevish. All right-thinking people are peevish.) Like you, I am peeved by many things. I have my pet peeves; you have yours. A peeve is an annoying or vexatious occurrence. Peeves loom large in our consciousness not because they concern important things, but precisely because they don't. Peeves are ubiquitous, gratuitous, and insidious. They don't make our lives miserable; they make them unpleasant.

As any sports fan knows, a grand slam is a home run struck while the bases are loaded. All grand slams are home runs, but not all home runs are grand slams. My adopted baseball team is the Texas Rangers. I watch most of the team's games on television. When a player comes to bat with the bases loaded, the Rangers' television producer displays the following graphic:

Career with bases loaded: .326 avg., 2 grand slams.

I hate this! It should say "2 home runs," not "2 grand slams." The latter implies that there could be a home run with the bases loaded that is not a grand slam. Another way to handle this is to omit "Career with bases loaded" and display, simply, "2 career grand slams." Is anyone else vexed by this? I take my baseball very seriously, as several former friends know. This mindlessness has got to stop; it threatens the integrity of the sport.

Eric Lormand, "Qualia! (Now Showing at a Theater Near You)," Philosophical Topics 22 (spring 1994): 127.

Alex Kozinski and Sean Gallagher, "Death: The Ultimate Run-On Sentence," Case Western Reserve Law Review 46 (1995): 1.

Philip Mirowski, "Civilization and Its Discounts," Dialogue 34 (summer 1995): 541.

Bradley Reed Howard, "Mind-Forged Manacles: Resistance, Rebellion . . . , and the Twilight of the Idols (or How to Anthropologize with a Hammer)," Polar: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 18 (November 1995): 35.

Margaret F. Brinig and F. H. Buckley, "The Market for Deadbeats," Journal of Legal Studies 25 (January 1996): 201.

The good doctor denies the right of people to make risk assessments. [See here.] If life is to be governed by "zero" or "minimal" risk, then one doesn't get out of bed, much less take a plane flight for pleasure or business for that matter. Driving a car is clearly out of the question.

I got my eyes fixed after a lifetime of wearing glasses . . . which were costing me on the average $300/year. Thus, at a minimum, it's a cost saving, given that I have now lived long enough to completely amortize the cost. Second, the pleasure of waking in the morning and being able to see the clock without fishing for glasses is well less than a hot shower, but it too occurs every day. Third, if one has to wear heavy prescriptions (thanks among other things to our government's mandate that doesn't permit ultra-thin centers on glasses), there is active pain to wearing the glasses: reducing that chronic pain is worth it in its own right.

Finally, I care nothing about random people in Nepal. This is the same as the old "clean your plate; there are starving people in India" reasoning. Deny yourself some pleasure because others may not be having a wonderful time, irrelevant and silly. There are only 25 million or so people in Nepal. Are they all going blind? At $50 per person to "prevent blindness," a very small percentage of the laser-treatment recipients in this country would "prevent blindness" for every person in Nepal. Not a likely actual need.

In other words, Dr. Kalayoglu is another of the standard leftist killjoys. No one may have any fun until we're all equally miserable. I invite him to take a long walk off a short pier.

Yoke, n. An implement, madam, to whose Latin name, jugum, we owe one of the most illuminating words in our language—a word that defines the matrimonial situation with precision, point and poignancy. A thousand apologies for withholding it.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

I followed your link to Old Benjamin's post. I noted that in the quote from Ron Klain, he mentions "gaps" in President Bush's Yale course work in regards to his supposed stupidity. How does he (and the Democrats) think that President Bush obtained a Masters of Business Administration degree from Harvard Business School? Certainly not by being stupid! Here is an interesting article about President Bush by a man who attended HBS at the same time and graduated a year behind the (future) president. The conduct of the Democrats is becoming more and more dishonorable. Yes, I believe in the concept of honor, must be that military upbringing. I know it's odd any more to find this belief, but then, I've always been a little behind the times. ;^)

jan

Do plants have rights? See here.

If you look up "atheism" in a dictionary, you will probably find it defined as the belief that there is no God. Certainly many people understand atheism in this way. Yet many atheists do not, and this is not what the term means if one considers it from the point of view of its Greek roots. In Greek "a" means "without" or "not" and "theos" means "god." From this standpoint an atheist would simply be someone without a belief in God, not necessarily someone who believes that God does not exist. According to its Greek roots, then, atheism is a negative view, characterized by the absence of belief in God.

Well-known atheists of the past such as Baron d'Holbach (1770), Richard Carlile (1826), Charles Southwell (1842), Charles Bradlaugh (1876), and Anne Besant (1877) have assumed or have explicitly characterized atheism in the negative sense of absence of belief in God. Furthermore, in the twentieth century George H. Smith, in Atheism: The Case Against God (1979), maintains, "An atheist is not primarily a person who believes that god does not exist; rather he does not believe in the existence of god." Antony Flew, in "The Presumption of Atheism" (1972), understands an atheist as someone who is not a theist. Gordon Stein, in An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism (1980), says an atheist "is a person without a belief in God." A recent pamphlet entitled "American Atheists: An Introduction" says an atheist "has no belief system" concerning supernatural agencies. Another recent pamphlet entitled "American Atheists: A History" defines American atheism as "the philosophy of persons who are free from theism."

Still there is a popular meaning of "atheism" according to which an atheist not simply holds no belief in the existence of a god or gods but believes that there is no god or gods. This use of the term should not be overlooked. To avoid confusion, let us call this positive atheism, and the type of atheism derived from the Greek root and held by the atheistic thinkers surveyed above let us call negative atheism. Clearly, positive atheism is a special case of negative atheism: Someone who is a positive atheist is by necessity a negative atheist, but not conversely.

In my usage, positive atheism is positive only in the sense that it refers to a positive belief—the belief that there is no god or gods. It is positive in contrast to negative atheism, which has no such positive belief. Of course, in another sense that is not relevant here, what I have called positive atheism is more negative than what I have called negative atheism. Positive atheism denies that one or more gods exist; negative atheism does not.

(Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990], 463-4 [italics in original; endnotes omitted])

To the Editor:

Re "To Read the Menu, Baby Boomers Turn to Eye Treatments" (front page, April 11):

Let's not forget that all of these "eye treatments," whether they use a knife, laser or radio waves, are cosmetic surgical procedures and therefore carry unnecessary risk of permanent eye damage.

In addition, although the Food and Drug Administration may deem these procedures safe, nobody knows how they will affect our eyes years from now.

Why is the public so ready to abandon a perfectly safe and effective pair of glasses for the hazards of refractive surgery? And why are physicians, scientists and entrepreneurs spending so much valuable energy nurturing society's cosmetic cravings?

If so many are willing to dish out "$1,500 for a three-minute remedy" to eyeglasses, I challenge them to contribute the same amount toward world blindness: $1,500 would pay for 30 sight-saving cataract surgeries in Nepal.

MURAT KALAYOGLU, M.D.
Boston, April 11, 2004
The writer is an ophthalmology resident at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.

Have you ever seen a bicycle race? If so, did you wonder why the racers crowd together into packs? (The main pack is called "the peloton.") It might seem that individuals would ride on their own, each trying to stay away from the others. Not so.

The reason they stay together is to conserve energy. It's been estimated that drafting on another rider requires only seventy percent of the energy it would take to ride alone. Let me give an example. Suppose two racers take turns "pulling" (breaking the wind). Suppose they're equally strong and do exactly the same amount of pulling. Racer A's energy expenditure is 100% while pulling and 70% while drafting. On average, A's energy expenditure is 85% (170/2). The same is true of racer B, of course. Two racers taking turns save a lot of energy.

Now add a third racer, C. The average energy expenditure for each racer drops to 80% (240/3). This makes sense. Three racers, rather than two, are dividing up the work. Let's add racers to see what happens to the average energy expenditure of each:

1 = 100%
2 = 85%
3 = 80%
4 = 77.5%
5 = 76%
6 = 75%
7 = 74.2%
8 = 73.75%
9 = 73.3%
10 = 73%

As you can see, the marginal benefit decreases as the number of racers grows. By the time you get a pack of five, you don't gain much from each additional racer. This is why you see small breakaway packs in races. Four or five racers working together can get away and stay away from a large pack. But they must keep working. This is why hangers-on are discouraged. Suppose five people are riding together but one of them never takes a turn at the front. The four who are working are expending 77.5%. The one who is not working is expending 70%. This latter racer will be fresher at the finish, which may come down to a sprint. There's an unwritten rule in professional bicycling that if you don't work, you don't contest the sprint.

Sometimes there are solo breakaways. These require superhuman effort. A Frenchman named Jacky Durand has made a reputation for breaking away early in long races. Sometimes he rides more than a hundred miles on his own. The peloton lets him go, since he almost always fails. (When he's caught, he is said to have been "reeled in.") But Durand has won races. He must figure that the occasional victory is worth the suffering he endures. If he breaks away all the time, he might win every tenth or twentieth time. If he stays in the peloton, he might never win, since he's not a good sprinter. I admire him. He has grit.

Today I did my third bike rally of the year, in Granbury. It's a beautiful place. Everything is green at this time of year. (It will be brown from the heat in a couple of months.) I saw cattle grazing in the prairie, horses standing in a field, even a donkey. I saw windmills, craggy rock formations, hillsides covered with bluebonnets and other flowers, and a ranch dating to 1858. I always wear a heart-rate monitor when I ride so I can evaluate my effort. Today, while riding with two friends, I watched what happened when I occupied various positions in our pace line. When I was pulling, my heart rate rose to the mid-150s. (The highest I reached today was 161.) When I dropped back to draft, it fell to the mid-120s. That shows, as clearly as anything can, how much energy I was expending. Thank you, Phil and Randy, for making it easier!

I get e-mail from people who say they love my posts on animals but hate those on politics. I get e-mail from people who say they love my posts on politics but hate those on animals. This just shows that we're different people, not one big person. I love Andrew Sullivan's posts on the war in Iraq and on the divide between liberals and conservatives. I hate his posts on homosexual "marriage." I'm sure there are people who love Sullivan's posts on homosexual "marriage" and hate his posts on the war and other matters. Here is an essay by Andrew Sullivan that I like. I wish I had written it.

I bought my first guitar—a pawnshop special—on 4 April 1975, just three days before my eighteenth birthday. It soon gave way to a better model, and eventually to an even better one. I learned my chords from books. I talked to and watched other guitarists. I played, played, and played some more. But I never took lessons. Whatever proficiency I attained was due to hard work and trial and error.

By the time I was in law school I knew a great many songs—mostly rock and roll—and was capable of playing in a band. Unfortunately, I had little time for it. Law is a jealous mistress. One day I met a man named Bob Flowers through a common friend. Bob lived nearby, so I went to his apartment from time to time to jam. What a strange character Bob was! He had a different relation to his music than I had to mine. Bob would play an old song by The Who and stop it in mid-beat. "Hear that?" he would ask. "Nope," I said. He would describe it in detail and play it again. Still I didn't hear it.

Bob heard things I didn't. He knew things I didn't. He felt things I didn't. He must have thought I had promise as a guitarist or he wouldn't have wasted his time with me, but he didn't like my style. He said I had too much "flash." His aim, he confided, was to take it "out" of me. I wasn't sure at the time what he meant, but now I know. I was undisciplined. I lacked patience. I wasn't accommodating to my playing partners. I had no ear for subtlety. I wasn't respecting the music, the instrument, or those with whom I was playing.

There's a right way and a wrong way to do things. Take typing, for instance. Some people take pride in using the hunt-and-peck method. Some are even fast at it. But it's wrong. The correct way to type is to keep one's fingers on the keys at all times, in the home position. It takes time, effort, and discipline to learn to type the right way, but you can't call yourself a typist unless you do. I type the way Bob Flowers played guitar. If I saw him hunting and pecking at a keyboard, I would try to take the flash out of him.

What we're talking about is craft. Each human activity has an internal logic and integrity. Craftsmanship consists in understanding this logic and self-consciously conforming oneself to it. Judging is a craft. A judge who implements his or her moral principles rather than conforming to the internal logic of the role is disrespectful. To be a judge is to be both free and constrained—in the right way and to the right degree. Some judges disrespect the constraints. They have, in Bob's words, too much flash. Some judges err in the other direction by failing to exercise creative freedom. This is rightly derided as mechanical jurisprudence. A judge is neither a moral philosopher, reasoning from scratch, nor a machine, stamping out rulings. A judge is a judge.

Like so many people who taught me, Bob Flowers disappeared into the woodwork. I lost track of him when I moved from Madison Heights to Pontiac during my third year of law school. To be honest, we didn't get along. I was headstrong. I resented his attempt to cabin my playing. But Bob was right. He was trying to help me. He was trying to promote a greater respect—in me—for the instrument he and I loved. Bob's insistence on craftsmanship has made me a better person in many ways, ways he could never have imagined. Thank you, Bob, wherever you are.

dear mr. burgess-jackson, i have discovered your web log (both, actually), parts of which i rather enjoy. especially issues on animal rights and their linking (though i could not disagree more) with vegetarianism [to which i had to link in my nectar&ambrosia blog]—and the variety of responses you publish.

best regards,
jens f. laurson
Editor-in-Chief
Center for International Relations
International Affairs Forum

To the Editor:

Thank you for honoring those who have sacrificed for our safety and the freedoms of others in "Deadly Week Ends in Tears for the Fallen" (front page, April 15). Your article, and a difficult week in Iraq, gave us 64 more reasons we cannot fail in the global war on terror. The article reminded us of 64 people to whom each of us owes unending gratitude.

It is unfortunate that you chose to argue politics in the tribute and felt it acceptable to take advantage of military families in their darkest hours of grief. We owe it to the fallen, and to those they left behind, to behave like a nation worthy of their supreme sacrifice.

(Maj.) TERI CONSOLDANE
Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, April 15, 2004

To the Editor:

After reading "Deadly Week Ends in Tears for the Fallen" (front page, April 15), I can't help wondering if many in the American media are contributing to the unrealistic and defeatist expectations regarding military operations in Iraq.

The loss of a single American soldier in Iraq is a terrible tragedy, but the price for freedom is often costly. Compared with past American military operations of this magnitude, the war in Iraq has been a stunning success, with a minimal loss of life. But that is certainly not the impression one receives when reading of the "heavy toll" that has been paid in Iraq.

Given the media's military expectations, how well would Abraham Lincoln have fared during the blood bath of the Civil War? Would he have even made it beyond the first Battle of Bull Run without being compelled to sue for peace? Probably not. And America would have been the worse for it.

PAUL R. IPEMA
Nampa, Idaho, April 15, 2004

Four attorneys calling themselves Advisory Opinion publish a blog. See here. One of them, Old Benjamin, sent a link to this post, which is interesting. Thanks, Ben!

I was unable to get to Bill Keezer's blog for a couple of days, but things seem to be back to normal. Bill has posted several provocative items, including one on bagpipes (which I enjoy; but hey, I like accordions, too) and one on airline security. See here.

Here is a flier for my fall course on Lewis and Clark. Thanks to Denny Bradshaw for preparing it. He has a career as a graphic artist if he ever tires of philosophy.

Dr. Burgess-Jackson,

I read with interest your post of 4/12 where you discussed "liberal dishonesty," and the liberal method of argument. It brought to mind an e-mail I received not long ago from a reader of my biweekly editorial in the Asheville Citizen-Times. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Mark Ruscoe
Asheville, NC

Here is more fun for you Roscoe, you rascal. Did you notice the article in today's paper, where you sometimes publish a column, on the loss of jobs in the area? Maybe you will take notice now. Did you notice also the stingy creation of just 21,000 new jobs in February, with downward revisions for previous months? We need at least 150,000 new jobs/month just to employ people graduating to the work force. Actually the labor force shrank by 392,000 souls because they have given up on looking for jobs. Almost three years into the recovery the economy should be churning out 200,000 to 300,000 jobs each month. If you include people who quit looking for jobs, plus those eager to work and tried recently but failed, plus part-time people who want a full-time job then the jobless rate is actually 9.6%. Figures are from last Barron's magazine, not exactly a left-wing publication. Why do you persist in lying? It's because you are a vicious Republican.

As for your last inane, stupid column on the religious right and the GOP, you do not even know the difference between secularism and having a social and moral conscience. Hiding in the National Guard during the Viet Nam conflict and then sending thousands to be killed is not exactly moral fortitude; it is hypocrisy, moral bankruptcy, and many other bad things. There is no animosity towards Judeo-Christian teachings by the Democrats, they just do not accept having fundamentalist bigoted ignoramuses cram their religion down other people's throats. Can you not understand that? As for Bob Jones and Bush, you fail to mention the despicable lying campaign against McCain and his wife. Nice Christians bastard that Bush and Karl (Goebbels) Rove. I bet you enjoyed watching Passion of the Christ you sadomasochistic despicable lying swine. Have a good laugh Roscoe.

Death can be a harm to the person who dies in virtue of the interests he had antemortem that are totally and irrevocably defeated by his death. The subject of the harm in death is the living person antemortem, whose interests are squelched. The fact of a person's death "makes it true" that his antemortem interests were going to be defeated and to that extent the antemortem person was harmed too, though his impending death was still unknown to him. Only the person who no longer has an interest in any goal that can be set back by his death is unharmed by death, and indeed such a person may even be the antemortem beneficiary on balance of his own death. The interests of a person that can be said to have "survived" his death are those ulterior interests that can still be thwarted or promoted by subsequent events. These include his publicly oriented and other-regarding interests, and also his "self-centered" interests in being thought of in certain ways by others. Posthumous harm occurs when one of the deceased's surviving interests is thwarted after his death. The subject of a surviving interest and of the harm or benefit that can accrue to it after a person's death is the living person antemortem whose interest it was. Events after death do not retroactively produce effects at an earlier time, but their occurrence can lead us to revise our estimates of an earlier person's well-being, and correct the record before closing the book on his life.

(Joel Feinberg, Harm to Others, vol. 1 of The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law [New York: Oxford University Press, 1984], 93)

Dennis Mangan replies to my PETA post.

I have a confession to make. I enjoy watching people lose control—provided they don't get violent. Self-control is what distinguishes humans from animals. When we lose it, even momentarily, we become animals. Twice a week, I watch Paul Krugman go beastly. Judging from his columns (see here for today's), he is filled with rage toward President Bush. He must lie awake at night grinding his teeth, thinking of a new angle from which to criticize the Bush administration. I can just see him talking to someone about President Bush. Spittle flies from his mouth as he stammers his opposition. His face reddens. He gestures wildly. His voice cracks with emotion.

What is it with this man? I have never seen anyone so discombobulated by policy differences. Ah, but that's just it. He doesn't have only policy differences with the president. Policy differences wouldn't generate such irrational, hysterical behavior. It's personal. Paul Krugman hates the Bush family, and our current president in particular. Watching him go apoplectic twice a week for four more years is reason enough to hope for President Bush's reelection.

I hope all of you are exercising on a regular basis. Your heart is a muscle. As such, it needs exercise. Think of your cardiovascular system as your engine. Most of the time it's idling, but it needs to be revved on a regular basis. Take your resting heart rate every week or two. Write it down. Watch how vigorous exercise drives it down and keeps it down. Your resting heart rate is the best measure of your cardiovascular fitness. One way to stay motivated (and avoid burnout) is to join a club. Here is my bike club. Here is my running club.

Bore, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Sooner or later, in one way or another, the consumers want to live out the pornography further in three dimensions. Sooner or later, in one way or another, they do. It makes them want to; when they believe they can, when they feel they can get away with it, they do. Depending upon their chosen sphere of operation, they may use whatever power they have to keep the world a pornographic place so they can continue to get hard from everyday life. As pornography consumers, teachers may become epistemically incapable of seeing their women students as their potential equals and unconsciously teach about rape from the viewpoint of the accused. Doctors may molest anesthetized women, enjoy watching and inflicting pain during childbirth, and use pornography to teach sex education in medical school. Some consumers write on bathroom walls. Some undoubtedly write judicial opinions.

Some pornography consumers presumably serve on juries, sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee, answer police calls reporting domestic violence, edit media accounts of child sexual abuse, and produce mainstream films. Some make wives and daughters and clients and students and prostitutes look at it and do what is in it. Some sexually harass their employees and clients, molest their daughters, batter their wives, and use prostitutes—with pornography present and integral to the acts. Some gang rape women in fraternities and at rest stops on highways, holding up the pornography and reading it aloud and mimicking it. Some become serial rapists and sex murderers—using and making pornography is inextricable to these acts—either freelancing or in sex packs known variously as sex rings, organized crime, religious cults, or white supremacist organizations. Some make pornography for their own use and as a sex act in itself, or in order to make money and support the group's habit.

This does not presume that all pornography is made through abuse or rely on the fact that some pornography is made through coercion as a legal basis for restricting all of it. Empirically, all pornography is made under conditions of inequality based on sex, overwhelmingly by poor, desperate, homeless, pimped women who were sexually abused as children. The industry's profits exploit, and are an incentive to maintain, these conditions. These conditions constrain choice rather than offering freedom. They are what it takes to make women do what is in even the pornography that shows no overt violence.

(Catharine A. MacKinnon, Only Words [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993], 19-20 [endnotes omitted; italics in original])

To the Editor:

You write (editorial, April 14): "The United States has experienced so many crises since Mr. Bush took office that it sometimes feels as if the nation has embarked on one very long and painful learning curve in which every accepted truism becomes a doubt, every expectation a question mark. Only Mr. Bush somehow seems to have avoided any doubt, any change."

I wonder if we watched the same press conference.

I saw a president who very much acknowledged doubt, but who also very much stands by decisions he was forced to make, in the context of information available at the time.

He didn't say his way was the only way; he said we must avoid the catastrophe of defeat and keep alive the possibility of a democratic Middle East.

I sometimes think that if there is a way to be gloomy, defeated and discouraged about something, The Times will find it.

STEVE WEINER
Des Plaines, Ill., April 14, 2004

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is a despicable organization. I repeat what I said before: It is the worst thing ever to happen to animals. See here, here, and here for its latest self-defeating campaign.

Isn't there something wrong with an organization that uses tactics that antagonize even those most committed to the cause of animal liberation? Think about it. With friends like these, animals don't need enemies.

Abraham Lincoln died on this date in 1865. He has always fascinated and inspired me. Here is a letter he wrote at the age of fifty, while seeking the Republican Party's presidential nomination:

Springfield,
Dec. 20. 1859

J. W. Fell, Esq

My dear Sir:

Herewith is a little sketch, as you requested. There is not much of it, for the reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me.

If any thing be made out of it, I wish it to be modest, and not to go beyond the material. If it were thought necessary to incorporate any thing from any of my speeches, I suppose there would be no objection. Of course it must not appear to have been written by myself. Yours very truly

A. LINCOLN

I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families—second families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks, some of whom now reside in Adams, and others in Macon counties, Illinois. My paternal grandfather, Abraham Lincoln, emigrated from Rockingham County, Virginia, to Kentucky, about 1781 or 2, where, a year or two later, he was killed by indians, not in battle, but by stealth, when [where?] he was laboring to open a farm in the forest. His ancestors, who were quakers, went to Virginia from Berks County, Pennsylvania. An effort to identify them with the New-England family of the same name ended in nothing more definite, than a similarity of Christian names in both families, such as Enoch, Levi, Mordecai, Solomon, Abraham, and the like.

My father, at the death of his father, was but six years of age; and he grew up, litterally without education. He removed from Kentucky to what is now Spencer county, Indiana, in my eighth year. We reached our new home about the time the State came into the Union. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up. There were some schools, so called; but no qualification was ever required of a teacher, beyond "readin, writin, and cipherin," to the Rule of Three. If a straggler supposed to understand latin, happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked upon as a wizzard. There was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for education. Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher to the Rule of three; but that was all. I have not been to school since. The little advance I now have upon this store of education, I have picked up from time to time under the pressure of necessity.

I was raised to farm work, which I continued till I was twenty two. At twenty one I came to Illinois, and passed the first year in Illinois—Macon county. Then I got to New-Salem, (at that time in Sangamon, now in Menard county[)], where I remained a year as a sort of Clerk in a store. Then came the Black-Hawk war; and I was elected a Captain of Volunteers—a success which gave me more pleasure than any I have had since. I went the campaign, was elated, ran for the Legislature the same year (1832) and was beaten—the only time I have been beaten by the people. The next, and three succeeding biennial elections, I was elected to the Legislature. I was not a candidate afterwards. During this Legislative period I had studied law, and removed to Springfield to practice it. In 1846 I was once elected to the lower House of Congress. Was not a candidate for re-election. From 1849 to 1854, both inclusive, practiced law more assiduously than ever before. Always a whig in politics, and generally on the whig electoral tickets, making active canvasses. I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again. What I have done since then is pretty well known.

If any personal description of me is thought desirable, it may be said, I am, in height, six feet, four inches, nearly; lean in flesh, weighing, on an average, one hundred and eighty pounds; dark complexion, with coarse black hair, and grey eyes—no other marks or brands recollected. Yours very truly

A. LINCOLN
Hon. J. W. Fell.

(Abraham Lincoln, Mystic Chords of Memory: A Selection from Lincoln's Writings, ed. Larry Shapiro [New York: Book-of-the-Month Club, 1984], 9-11, reprinted from The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler [1953])

A former student of mine (one of my favorites), with whom I had many long and interesting conversations, wrote to tell me about his application for a job as a police officer in Las Vegas, Nevada. I thought I'd share his letter with you (by his permission). I do so not to blow my own horn (although I'm dang proud of him), but to show that philosophy has its uses. Here goes:

Keith, thanks a bunch [for allowing him to list my name as a reference]. . . . Listen, I went to Las Vegas to take the written exam, which I passed. I was then scheduled for the oral exam the next day. This board consisted of 3 officers who grilled me with many questions and scenarios. One of the main questions that was asked of me was "what have you done to prepare yourself to become an officer in law enforcement and why do you think you qualify?" Part of my response to the question was my education and training in philosophy. I described the classes in Ethics, Logic, Philosophy of Religion, and Philosophy of Law, and how I apply what I learned to everyday life and my work ethic. They were quite impressed with that portion and I scored an overall grade of 95% out of a possible 100% on the oral exam!! I had the highest oral-exam score of all those who were interviewed. I hold those lectures of yours with me every day and I learned a ton from them. You are a huge part of my success in life and my possible employment with this police department. Thank you for everything.

Your student and friend,

Nico

Aw, shucks. Twarn't nothin'.

To the Editor:

Re "For Ralph Nader, but Not for President," by Howard Dean (Op-Ed, April 12):

I worked actively in Dr. Dean's campaign, motivated largely by his willingness to speak his mind. This alone set him apart from any recent Democratic candidate.

Ralph Nader is not the problem. The Democratic Party is the problem. Who among us is not uneasy with the Bush administration?

Let Mr. Nader express his own views and policies, and let anyone who feels that he is a good candidate vote for him. It's a free country, isn't it?

MARCY TELLES
San Rafael, Calif., April 12, 2004

To the Editor:

If Howard Dean (Op-Ed, April 12) even acknowledged the antidemocratic nature of the system that marginalizes third parties and encourages lesser-of-two-evils voting, I might believe that he is sincere about wanting "democracy for America."

Instead, he recycles the same tired rhetoric about how we must all unite behind the Democrat, whether he earns our support or not, simply because he is not George W. Bush. The more I hear this defense of the status quo, the more I understand why half the people regularly vote for "none of the above."

AMY STUART
Philadelphia, April 12, 2004

Paul Krugman, the Princeton economist who writes a semiweekly column (ostensibly on economic topics) for The New York Times, is the most partisan person I've ever run across. (For an objective assessment of Krugman's partisanship, see here.) In over a year and a half of reading Krugman's columns, I have never seen him say a good word about President Bush or any aspect of the Bush administration, and I have never seen him say a bad word about any Democrat (except to chide one Democrat for criticizing another).

Is there anything wrong with partisanship? Yes. Two things. First, it's unfair. As I wrote in a Tech Central Station column several months ago (see here), President Bush is not omnimalevolent. However bad you think he is, you don't think he's perfectly bad, or bad in all ways. He has good qualities. That Krugman can't see them, much less write about them, suggests animus. A fair person describes things as they are, not as he or she wishes them to be. Commend the good aspects of a person; condemn the bad.

Second, it undermines one's credibility. If Krugman took a more balanced (i.e., less partisan) approach to his subjects, he would earn his readers' (and my) respect and trust. But how can anyone trust him? He routinely distorts or hides facts to make President Bush look bad. He refuses to correct errors, of which he makes a great many. He seems hell-bent on defeating President Bush and gives no indication that anything will stop him in this quest.

Krugman's guiding star isn't truth or fairness; it's defeating the president. He's result-oriented. When I read Krugman's columns, I can't give him the benefit of the doubt on matters outside my ken, since I know from experience that he wouldn't tell the truth unless it promoted his goal. What troubles me about Krugman is that he's an academic. The twin academic virtues are truth and fairness. How can anyone take Krugman's academic work seriously when they see how blithely he treats truth and how rudely he treats those with whom he disagrees?

This is a clear case of crying wolf. By writing such shrill, partisan columns, Krugman undermines whatever credibility he would otherwise have. He's a party hack, not a disinterested seeker after truth (what we philosophers call a veracious inquirer). I wonder what Krugman's fellow economists think of him. I know that if any philosopher were as partisan as Krugman is, he or she would be roundly condemned. We philosophers take pride in our honesty and fairness. Yes, we have evaluative and interpretive disagreements, often profound, but none of us would ever distort or hide facts that go against our beliefs, and we certainly don't treat others with the contempt that Krugman displays in every column. He's a disgrace to academia. He gives economics an even worse name than it had, which is hard to do.

Keith,

I am not sure what your policy is on reader-to-reader discussions, but I would like to respond to Joanna's criticism if I may. I was unclear in my post and do not want to leave the impression that I deny the individuality of the steers I raise.

What follows is a bit lengthy, so feel free to cut and paste as you see fit—I also posted it on Mike's blog. I hope Big Hominid and Naked Villainy are ginning up some more site traffic for you.

Dear Joanna,

I'm always happy to bring happiness, humor, and joy to others. You should see me dance. Unfortunately, your amusement at my failure to recognize that meat comes from "individuals" arises only because I did not specify my background in my brief post. I am a small-scale organic farmer who sells a few (seven this year) custom-raised, humanely treated, grass-fed baby beef in the Shenandoah Mountains and certainly do not deny the individuality of the animals I raise. In fact, my blogosphere handle, "Smallholder," is taken from the English term that not only denotes someone who traditionally farms a small patch of land, but also lives in close harmony with his animals. I know each animal intimately, spending one or two hours in direct, hands-on contact with my boys every day.

If you were to drive up the hill at Sweet Seasons Farm at 5:00 AM on any day of the week, you would find the barn light on and yours truly inside, feeding the boys with hand-mixed milk replacer. As they drink, I rub their sides, talk to them, scratch their ears, and lift their tails to make sure they don't have runny manure. They particularly like chin rubs. As I clean out the night's manure, the only real difficulty I have is the lads throwing me off balance as they seek even more attention. The same process gets repeated each evening as well. In fact, one of the little scamps was too affectionate last night—I had forgotten the egg basket and carefully placed several eggs in my front pants pocket. One of my twins didn't think he had gotten enough love and butted my hip—breaking four of the eggs.

In fact, the close association with the individuals can get even more intense. Last year, a snowstorm coupled with freakish wind swirling through the hills pushed snow through the barn's second story, around the hayloft, and into the pen. I went out at eleven in the evening to check to see if my boys were snuggly warm in the midst of the blizzard and found them standing forlornly with a quarter inch of snow on their backs. Intellectually, I understand that cattle are built to survive this sort of thing—I have seen my neighbor's cattle with an inch of encrusted ice all over their hides—but I didn't want my lads to be cold. I jerry-rigged (look at me ethnically slandering myself) a tarp over the calf pen, rubbed them all over with a blanket, changed the straw bedding, and then proceeded to sleep in the barn to add my body heat to their pen. It was cold, nasty work. But I kind of enjoyed waking up at three in the morning with calves snuggled up to me on each side, their heads tucked between my shoulders and face.

This year I had an outbreak of pneumonia. I had one calf that I tube-fed three times a day for a week, cradling it in my arms and massaging its ribs to aid digestion.

I could provide many, many more examples.

I'm sure Joanna will object that it can't be humane because the guys must be terrified at the end of their lives. I'm sure the slaughtering process is hard on 99.9% of the steers destined for hamburger, but the kindness I have shown the boys and the mutual affection we have also help their ends come cleanly. They follow me right up to the truck and I drive over to a Mennonite Farmer who slaughters on the side. He takes the animals in the order that they arrive, so I shoot to get to his place at 4:00 AM so I am first in line. They calmly walk down the ramp and into the facility. He was shocked that they would just follow me like little lambs—normally unloading and moving is accompanied by a fair amount of yelling and shoving. He hits them with a .22-caliber bullet to the brain and they are down—no muss, no fuss.

Ah, many animal-rights advocates might contend, there is still cruelty because they die in the end. While I am in agreement with animal-rights activists in their critiques of unnecessary (mental and physical) cruelty, they typically lose me when they make that judgment. If the goal of animal-rights activists is to eliminate as much animal suffering as possible, attacking humane farming is not conducive to their end. My animals lead TREMENDOUSLY better lives on my farm then they would in nature.

The PETA crowd seems to misunderstand that "Mother Nature" is, as Gene Logsdon puts it, often "Old Bitch Nature." Animals aren't living out in a state of Disney Technicolor utopia. Animals in the wild are perpetually fearful, subject to predation, parasite-ridden, frequently sick, and constantly hungry. Most die young and their deaths are ugly, traumatic affairs.

Professor Burgess-Jackson has stated that the art of persuasion is based on making people realize that their basic beliefs are in conflict. I have a challenge for his readers.

If my beliefs are:

A) Suffering should be minimized.

B) Animals in my care, provided with meals, shelter, health care, and protection from predation, suffer much less than they would in the state of nature.

Show me where these beliefs are in conflict. Please do so without using the "don't use others as an end" arguments. I'd buy that in person-to-person relationships, but don't accord full moral (human) weight to animals.

Smallholder

Fidelity, n. A virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Thomas Jefferson was born on this date in 1743 (2 April on the old-style calendar). He was a great man. His purchase of Louisiana from the French was a masterstroke. Try to imagine the course of this nation's history without it. He was also instrumental in exploring the continent, through his protégé, Meriwether Lewis. Did you know that both Jefferson (the third president) and John Adams (the second) died on 4 July 1826, fifty years to the day after they signed the Declaration of Independence? I can't imagine anything flukier. Another thing you may not know about Jefferson is that he compiled a bible. His aim was to extract the sound moral parts and leave the unsound supernatural or superstitious parts. You could call him a Christian, but it would mislead. He thought highly of Jesus as a moralist, but denied Jesus's divinity. See here for a discussion of the Jefferson Bible and here for the text.

Most of us find it impossible to love the human race after we are forty. . . .

(Richard Robinson, An Atheist's Values [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964], 51)

To the Editor:

Regarding the actions that President Bush should have taken after the Aug. 6, 2001, memo regarding the possibility of hijackings (editorial, April 12), I just wonder if you and the A.C.L.U. would have approved if the president had instructed Attorney General John Ashcroft on Aug. 7 to stop all Arab and Muslim men from boarding aircraft at any United States airport. They would have fit the airlines' threat profiles, and this would perhaps have stopped 9/11.

People criticizing the government should say what should have been done. I suspect that anything Mr. Ashcroft said would have been howled down by these same groups.

STEVE WALLIS
North Haledon, N.J., April 12, 2004

Why must everything be politicized? Abortion is politicized. Health care is politicized. The environment is politicized. Sexual intercourse is politicized. Race is politicized. Education is politicized. Even war is politicized. War! An issue is politicized when it becomes a contest for power. Positions are taken, defended, and attacked. The "warring" camps dig in, preparing for battle. Adversaries become enemies. Normal rules of fairness and decency get brushed aside. All's fair in love and war.

The latest example of politicization is the so-called 9-11 Commission. President Bush, we now know, was given a briefing paper (see here) entitled "Bin Ladin [sic] Determined To Strike in US." One side says the briefing paper was so unspecific as to be useless. The other side says it proves President Bush knew about the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon ahead of time, the implication being that he didn't care or was ineffective. (Compare the argument from evil, which says that the existence of evil shows that if God exists, then either God is not perfectly good or God is not all-powerful.)

Does anyone seriously believe that President Bush could have prevented the attacks? What would be his motive for not preventing them? What would you have done if you were president and received the briefing paper? Imagine that President Bush, anticipating the attacks, shut down the commercial airline industry. Howls. Imagine that he profiled individuals of Middle Eastern descent. Howls. Imagine that he attacked Afghanistan. Howls. From the very people who now say he was indifferent or incompetent! (See here.)

But at the same time, it's disingenuous for President Bush or others in his administration to say that nothing could have been done. The nation could have been put on a heightened state of alert. Other measures could have been taken as well. Would these measures have prevented the attacks? Probably not. But the Bush administration should admit that it could have done more. One can always do more, especially when the nation's people are at risk.

Are you tired of the politicization of every issue? I am. Sometimes I wish both sides would rise above it. That one side politicizes an issue is no reason for the other to do so. As much as I like President Bush, I wish he would be more forthcoming with the American people and refrain from playing politics. Make the tough decisions; defend your decisions publicly; move on. Don't respond to sniping and don't reduce yourself to the level of those trying to supplant you. In other words, rise above petty politics. Be a statesman.

Donovan and Smallholder's posts read so much like Psychology 101 illustrations of Denial (animals don't suffer, Donovan), Justification (it's acceptable to eat meat because other animals do it, Donovan, or because the "meat" was raised "humanely," Smallholder) and Dissociation (meat comes from "humanely raised meat" not from individual animals, Smallholder), that they are almost comedic. Thank you, I enjoyed reading them.

Joanna

Dr. Burgess-Jackson,

Yesterday you posted a letter from "Donovan." May I reply?

Dear Donovan,

As a fellow omnivore, I also believe in eating meat. However, I am dismayed that you so blithely dismiss animal suffering. While the position that animals are not morally equivalent to humans is defensible, we still ought not to cause unnecessary pain and suffering when it is avoidable. If you are unwilling to minimize suffering for the sake of animals, do so for your own sake. The way we treat "lessers"—however one might define that term, reflects on us and changes us.

The best parallel that I can think of is the historical opposition that many virulent racists offered to the institution of slavery. They opposed chattel bondage not because they felt any sympathy for Africans but because the racists were alarmed by the way that the institution coarsened slaveholders.

I believe (the good professor will have to confirm this for me; it has been awhile since freshman philosophy) that Aquinas extended this rationale to animals. If I may paraphrase badly: even though they do not have moral weight (souls) we ought to treat them well so as not to develop the habit of cruelty that might then be extended to our fellow man.

You don't have to become a vegetarian to eschew being a cog in the horror machine. Buy humanely raised meat and enjoy it with a clean conscience.

Smallholder

Your political posts still tend to irk me, but the animal rights stuff is always thought-provoking.

All the best.

Why cant i deny that pain and suffering is bad for animals? For me its as simple as the food chain and im at the top of it. I love meat and have no quibbles about doing whatever is required to put it on my families dinner table. The super market just makes it easy. Got to love the division of labor!

Sorry i just dont put animals on the same playing field as humans.

Donovan

Bill Keezer has some interesting thoughts about violence over at Bill's Comments. See here. I think Bill is on the right track. It's not the representation of violence per se that's the problem. It's the context in which violence occurs. Is violence a first resort, a last resort, or an intermediate resort? It is gratuitous? Is it presented humorously, as in Roadrunner/Wile E. Coyote cartoons and Three Stooges episodes? Are the consequences of violent conduct shown? Is the violence deliberate (as opposed to rash)? Is it portrayed as an acceptable or desirable means to resolve conflicts? Is it depicted as an aberration or as the behavioral norm? Do the protagonists feel good about themselves when they resort to violence, or are they represented as conflicted? One can believe that an act of violence is justified, all things considered, while feeling remorseful about it. The remorse is important. It shows that an important moral barrier has been breached and that the perpetrator is wired correctly.

Keith,

I am looking forward to your "series of blog entries that address the most common confusions and fallacies" about the moral status of animals. I will definitely stay tuned.

Meanwhile, see here for an activist effort that we hope will achieve similar results in terms of clarifying people's moral thinking (ha!). Should confusion still persist even after the screening, then, at least the event will have benefited local farm sanctuaries. The fundraiser will be held at my studio. Discussion to follow the film. Wish us luck.

Joanna

Peg Kaplan over at what if? just sent a link to this essay by Paul R. Gross. (Thanks, Peg!) You may want to read this and this as prolegomenon.

Some people defend their omnivorous diet by citing their religion. This is puzzling. No religion, to my knowledge, requires meat-eating. Some forbid it. For those that neither require nor forbid it, meat-eating is permissible, optional, or discretionary. Whether you should eat meat depends, therefore, on other considerations besides your religion, such as whether it contributes to the amount of pain and suffering in the world.

Do you care about pain and suffering? I assume you care about your own pain and suffering. You probably also care about the pain and suffering of your loved ones. But why are pain and suffering bad? Don't say you're not sure whether they're bad. If you didn't believe they were bad, you wouldn't care whether you or your loved ones experience them. And once you admit that pain and suffering are bad, you can't very well deny that it's bad for anyone, even animals, to experience them. Pain is pain. Suffering is suffering. Why should it matter whether the being who suffers or experiences pain is white or black, male or female, American or Ethiopian, human or animal?

The meat you eat involved a great deal of pain, suffering, and deprivation. This is a fact, not an evaluation. (See here.) Most meat-eaters shield themselves (conveniently) from the suffering their actions cause. Find out how the meat that ends up in your grocery store got there. Ask yourself whether it's right for you to support an industry that inflicts such suffering. Don't say I'm imposing my values on you. I'm imposing your values on you. I'm trying to get you to examine your beliefs and behavior. I believe that if you do, you'll see that you're not living up to your moral principles. You would never think to inflict pain, suffering, and deprivation on a human being because of something as trivial as taste. Why is it permissible to inflict them on an animal?

Don't say that your religion draws a moral line between humans and animals. We've already been over that. Your religion doesn't require that you eat meat. At most, it allows you to eat meat. Whether you should do so, all things considered, is independent of your religious beliefs. It requires that you examine your beliefs about pain and suffering and draw a connection between your actions and various states of the world. It's within your power to reduce the amount of pain and suffering in the world. Do think it through—for the sake of the animals.

To the Editor:

The fundamental tenet behind pro-choice groups' ideology is to defend a woman's right to choose.

To choose what? If her right to choose is whether or not to have her baby once she is pregnant, then why not fully fight to support the Unborn Victims of Violence Act?

This legislation, summarized in "Reproductive Rights Assaulted" (editorial, April 5), makes it a criminal act to harm a fetus, separate from the crime of attacking a pregnant woman.

Doesn't this make sense? She has chosen to have her baby, and somebody else tried (or succeeded) in nullifying that choice. Pro-choice activists should be out in droves defending every woman's choice, be it abortion or childbirth.

This dichotomy only demonstrates to me that the pro-abortion lobby is just that: pro-abortion, not pro-choice. The choice ends when it lowers the number of abortions. Now this sounds like profound disrespect for women to me.

S. ABDALLA
South Bend, Ind., April 5, 2004

Have you noticed the pattern? Liberals lack argumentative skills, so they resort to various forms of abuse and dishonesty to influence voters. They "play the race card" whenever an African-American, such as Michael Jackson, is held responsible for his or her actions. This isn't argument. It's avoidance of argument. They attribute opposition to affirmative-action programs to racism. This silences opponents. They attribute opposition to homosexual "marriage" to religious fundamentalism or homophobia. Read Andrew Sullivan's blog if you think I'm making this up. They attribute opposition to abortion to religious fundamentalism or sexism. Opponents of abortion are either gripped by religious fervor or hell-bent on keeping women barefoot and pregnant. They attribute support for reduced taxes (or opposition to increased taxes) to greed or to favoritism for the affluent. They seem to think that money grows on trees.

See the pattern? Don't engage your adversaries on rational grounds. Dismiss them as irrational or malevolent. Impugn their motives. Challenge their integrity. Call their intelligence and good will into question. Opposition to the liberal program can't possibly be rational; it must be a manifestation of backwardness, superstition, ignorance, indifference, or self-interest. Conservatives are rednecks, hicks, hayseeds, philistines, and rubes. They're obstructionists. They have an undeveloped sense of justice. They're indifferent to suffering.

Please keep in mind that I was a liberal for a long time. I know the liberal mentality and tactics. Liberals have no shame. They're unfulfilled totalitarians. Their only goal, despite their declared concern for the disadvantaged, is power. Think about it. If liberals truly cared about the disadvantaged, as they say they do, they'd dispose of their wealth. There are enough wealthy liberals in this country to feed, clothe, shelter, and medicate every poor person. Don't hold your breath waiting for this to happen. The Kennedys are still wealthy, aren't they? John Kerry is more than happy to take advantage of the Heinz fortune. Liberals insist on forcing others to pay for their hare-brained social-engineering schemes. This suggests that they're driven by envy and spite, not benevolence.

Howard Dean isn't noted for his practical intelligence. Who else could have squandered the lead he had in the Democrat primary? But this column in today's New York Times takes the cake. Dean urges Democrats not to vote for Ralph Nader. Notice his reasoning. He doesn't try to persuade Democrats that John Kerry would make a better president than George W. Bush. He doesn't say anything about Kerry. He argues (fallaciously) that voting for Nader will increase the chances of a Bush reelection. The appeal isn't to the merits of the candidates but to the goal of defeating President Bush. As I've said many times in this blog, the liberal objective is power. Nothing—not principle, not fairness, not honesty, not even decency—stands in the way of its pursuit. Vote wisely.

One of the attractive features of most rights theories is the breadth of their humanism: natural rights (of one kind or another) are extended across human beings without distinction of gender, race, nationality, or creed. A (human) fetus is a stage in the life history of a human being. To deny it moral standing is to authorize modes of treatment of it that would otherwise be indefensible. Given that rights theories usually refuse to draw other distinctions among human beings, some case must be made for discriminating on grounds of age. Natural rights are held by their bearers simply in virtue of the kind of beings those bearers are. What is it about the nature of the fetus that disqualifies it from possessing a right to life?

Treatments of abortion in most feminist writings have given only the most cursory attention to this question. The pattern for such treatments was laid down by Simone de Beauvoir and consists of three steps. The first is to embed discussion of abortion in the wider context of women's control, or lack of it, over their reproductive lives. At this stage abortion is given no special notice at all; it is treated as though it were a form of contraception. The second step is to acknowledge the existence of moral opposition directed specifically to abortion but to classify all such opposition as religious. Those who assign rights to fetuses are assumed to do so on the ground that fetuses have souls. Because the existence of souls is a matter of faith rather than reason, objections to abortion are therefore irrational. Finally, the third step is to attribute restrictive abortion laws to a general pattern of patriarchy.

There is much in these contentions that is quite valid, but they fail utterly to confront the central question. Indeed, by branding conservatives as both superstitious and sexist, feminists imply that there is no rational case against abortion that they need address. But in this they are simply mistaken: most conservative arguments invoke no articles of faith and are rooted in principles that are free of discriminatory assumptions about the nature and status of women. By and large, conservatives have been more resourceful than liberals in constructing a purely rational foundation for their views on abortion. By failing to confront conservative arguments, and by choosing instead to discredit their opponents, feminists have fostered the impression that their own position lacks such a foundation. In any case, it is liberals who must offer some reason for denying moral rights to a particular class of human beings. Even if conservative arguments were as disreputable as feminists have claimed, this task could not be shirked.

Many feminists fail not only to defend their view of the fetus but even to define it. The liberal's practical goal is the removal of legal restrictions on abortion. Even in the absence of such restrictions abortions are rarely performed beyond the conventional point of fetal viability (sometime during the sixth month). In order to secure their practical objective it is sufficient for liberals to deny moral standing to fetuses up to this point; viability is the earliest time in ontogenesis at which the liberal can concede a right to life to the developing individual.

On the other hand most liberals show no eagerness to treat infanticide as a private act for which a similarly permissive policy would be appropriate. If such a defense of infanticide is to be avoided, birth is the latest time at which the liberal can concede a right to life to the developing individual. We may therefore assume that for most liberals the right to life is acquired sometime between viability and birth.

(L. W. Sumner, Abortion and Moral Theory [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981], 49-51 [footnotes omitted])

One of my academic specialties, stemming from my research on rape (see here and here), is violence. My latest publication, for example, is Keith Burgess-Jackson, "Violence in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy," chap. II-6.1.3 in International Handbook of Violence Research, ed. Wilhelm Heitmeyer and John Hagan (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), 989-1004. This essay summarizes and criticizes everything written on violence by analytic philosophers. It's about the concept of violence: what violence is, what forms it takes, how it manifests itself, and how it differs from other social phenomena, such as harming, wronging, and right-violating.

I'm not a social scientist, but I've read some of the social-scientific literature on the causes and consequences of violence. It's disturbing. The connection between representations of violence and violent behavior is becoming increasingly clear, as this story in today's Dallas Morning News shows. Science is confirming what common sense tells us (and what we have always known). If you're exposed to a great deal of normalized violence (we're not talking The Three Stooges, which is fanciful), it becomes part of your behavioral repertoire. It affects your feelings, your beliefs, your attitudes, and your values.

If you have children, even teenagers, please shield them from depictions of violence, not only for their sake, but for the sake of those on whom they may aggress. Children need a safe, secure, controlled world. A parent who allows a child to watch violence on television or at the movie theater is irresponsible. I'm not calling for censorship. I'm not even calling for heroic parenting. I'm calling for parenting.

Take some time this fine morning to read this essay by philosopher John Kekes over at Tech Central Station. I hope to see more of Dr Kekes's work at TCS! (Thanks to Bill Keezer at Bill's Comments for the link. I checked his site before checking TCS.)

Economy, n. Purchasing the barrel of whiskey that you do not need for the price of the cow that you cannot afford.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

I am constantly amazed and disappointed by the poor quality of thought about the moral status of animals. Sometimes I think meat-eating makes people's minds shut off. I've decided to begin a series of blog entries that address the most common confusions and fallacies. Stay tuned!

Steve Headley over at Texas Conservative is approaching 3,000 site visits. I chuckled when I visited his site a minute ago, because he says he gave up trying to publish blog entries at midnight, just as I did. I guess the problem I had with Blogger was not peculiar to me. Steve had a productive day at the computer. You may find this post especially interesting. It contains questions for John Kerry from military veterans.

I had an involuntary respite from blogging yesterday. I rode my bike in the morning and napped in the early afternoon. When I got up, refreshed, I fired up the computer for an afternoon of blogging and other stuff. (I write blog entries between tasks as a reward to myself.) My first post was "Texas Weather," but when I tried to publish it, using Blogger, it wouldn't upload. I tried many times during the course of the evening, but to no avail. Finally, at midnight, I gave up and turned the computer off.

The worst part was knowing that I hadn't posted anything that day. I'm pretty sure I've posted at least one item every day since beginning this blog more than five months ago (on 5 November 2003). Usually I post several items. When I woke up this morning, I was eager to see whether Blogger was working. It was. I published yesterday's post in short order. Then the good news. Since I had "posted" the item early in the evening, it received a date of Saturday, 10 April. It's only right, since I wrote it yesterday. My streak of blogging days continues.

I assume every Blogspot user had the same problem. I checked the blogs of others and didn't see any entries after about four o'clock. I'm tempted to complain to Blogspot about the problem, but you shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth. All I pay for my blogs, not counting the advertising at the top of the page, is ten dollars a month for the site counters.

To the Editor:

Re "Today's Lesson for College Students: Lighten Up" (front page, April 6): The very activities that colleges are trying to promote—knitting clubs, dance classes, massages, reading for pleasure—are what the application process tends to overlook.

Whether or not colleges mean to, they are weeding out students who spend their high school afternoons discussing Russian literature or walking around barefoot in the tulips or playing video games—unless, of course, they give one of those activities a club name and are able to put it on their college application.

College students are not the only ones who need to lighten up. We need to start valuing things that aren't so serious. Maybe college admissions officers should stop prizing only type-A students who play three varsity sports, get 4.0's and write plays in their free time.

AMANDA GIBBON
Arlington, Va., April 6, 2004

The "sin tax" is a great concept—raise money for something most people agree is good (say, schools) by taxing something most people agree is bad (say, tobacco).

A "sin tax" being kicked around Austin right now involves, among other things, raising taxes on cigarettes, adult entertainment—and soft drinks.

But why stop there?

Aren't there other things that we'd all like to see taxed into oblivion? Here are some modest proposals:

Cellphone use: A per-minute tax for people who talk while driving. And while we're at it—a fee for annoying ring tones that go off in public.

Guys who peel rubber: Measure the tread mark, charge by the inch. Double after 9 p.m.

Small children in R-rated movies: The rate increases 1 percent for each dirty word they learn.

Cursing in public: Police could carry around a coffee can and collect a quarter per expletive, just like Mom used to do with Dad.

Low-rise jeans: Because they make everyone look fat, even the skinny girls. Remember, the idea of a "sin tax" is supposed to be for your own good.

Plastic grocery bags: Print the name of the store on them, tax the store for each one caught in a tree limb or fluttering across a vacant lot.

Car salesmen: Forget raising taxes on cars—let's go after the guys who TALK THIS LOUD in their own commercials. (Additional fees may apply; title and license charges not included; your mileage from this idea may vary.)

"Free" chips and salsa at restaurants: Actually, we like chips and salsa. So let's tax stale chips and tepid salsa. Probably cooked up by some Northerners—let's tax them, while we're at it, unless they know that when we ask for HOT sauce down here, we mean it.

People who bring 13 items in the "12 items or less" checkout lane: Charge per excess item.

Reality programs on TV: Stations that air more than one hour per night would have to make a donation to PBS.

Silly ideas from politicians, and journalists who write endlessly about them: The rate rises depending on how much each report raised the average reader's blood pressure.

Texas Living staff

Leslie A. Johnson, "Settled Insanity Is Not a Defense: Has the Colorado Supreme Court Gone Crazy?" University of Kansas Law Review 43 (October 1994): 259.

Ian M. Rose, "Barring Foreigners from Our Airwaves: An Anachronistic Pothole on the Global Information Highway," Columbia Law Review 95 (June 1995): 1188.

William Ewald, "Comparative Jurisprudence (I): What Was It Like to Try a Rat?" University of Pennsylvania Law Review 143 (June 1995): 1889.

Grantland M. Clapacs, "'When in Nome . . .': Custom, Culture and the Objective Standard in Alaskan Adverse Possession Law," Alaska Law Review 11 (December 1994): 301.

Kent D. Streseman, "Headshrinkers, Manmunghers, Moneygrubbers, Nuts and Sluts: Reexamining Compelled Mental Examinations in Sexual Harassment Actions Under the Civil Rights Act of 1991," Cornell Law Review 80 (May 1995): 1268.

Steve Stone, who played Major League Baseball for many years, is an announcer for the Chicago Cubs. During today's game, which I watched on WGN, he perpetuated a myth about the 1984 Detroit Tigers that I want to destroy. Stone said that the 1984 Tigers were the only team to have won a divisional title in the first forty games of a season. (Teams play 162 games.) The Tigers began the 1984 season an incredible 35-5, which is a winning percentage of 87.5. It's hard enough to win seven of eight games at any point in a season. The Tigers did it for five consecutive eight-game blocs!

So far, I have no gripe. But Stone then added that the Tigers played ".500 ball the rest of the way." In other words, they lost as many games as they won. This is not even close to being the case. The Tigers finished the 1984 season 104-58, which is a winning percentage of 64.1. If you do the subtraction, you find that the Tigers were 69-53 for the final 122 games of the season. That's a winning percentage of 56.5. A team that won 56.5% of its games for an entire season would win 91.6 games. Sometimes that's enough to win a divisional title!

Contrary to Stone's suggestion, the Tigers played superb baseball all season. Their season didn't go from miraculous to mediocre; it went from miraculous to magnificent. And it didn't end with the regular season, either. They swept the Kansas City Royals in three games in the American League Championship Series and defeated the San Diego Padres in five games in the World Series. Fittingly, they won seven of eight postseason games to match their early-season pace. Here's a summary of the season:

35-5 (87.5%) (first forty games)
69-53 (56.5%) (remaining 122 games)
104-58 (64.1%) (regular-season total)
111-59 (65.2%) (regular season plus postseason)

Don't mess with my Tigers. It's been twenty years since they won a World Series. Twenty years makes a man ornery.

Sheriff, n. In America the chief executive officer of a county, whose most characteristic duties, in some of the Western and Southern States, are the catching and hanging of rogues.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Every year, between the months of March and November (inclusive), I participate in bike rallies. I've done as many as thirty-one rallies in a year. For the past few years I've averaged about twenty-two. A bike rally is an event for bicyclists. For example, today there was a rally in Lancaster, a town south of Dallas. I've done it several times. I got up, drove 34.6 miles to Lancaster, parked my car, walked to the registration area, picked up my packet, and returned to my car to prepare. By 8:50, ten minutes before the start, hundreds of bicyclists were lined up on a side street waiting to be loosed on the unsuspecting residents of Lancaster and vicinity.

Rallies are not races, although some of them have a monetary prize for the first person to finish. Most people show up to ride, not race. They ride for health, for enjoyment, for the camaraderie, and because they want to get outside. You see every sort of person at bike rallies: old, middle-aged, and young; male and female; black, white, Asian, and Hispanic; tall and short; heavy and thin. You see tandems, recumbents, and ordinaries. A bike rally is a microcosm of society.

I used to hammer at every rally. (I've done 326 of them—counting today's—since 30 September 1989.) To hammer is to ride hard, all the time. Every hill is a personal challenge. You get out of the saddle to climb it, or, if you're descending, get into your best tuck position to get your speed as high as possible. (I've gone as fast as fifty-two miles per hour.) Hammering gets old after a while, although I've never tired of riding in packs or pace lines. There came a point when I wanted to have fun rather than torture myself. It helped that I had taken up marathon running (in September 1996, at the age of thirty-nine). This served as an outlet for my competitiveness. Bicycling became a social event—a chance to see and talk to friends and acquaintances, to enjoy the countryside, and to experience small-town Texas life. (Every rally goes through several small towns, often down their main streets.)

Unlike some sports, bicycling takes place in all kinds of weather. I've ridden in oppressive heat (one hundred degrees Fahrenheit and more) and in frigid cold. I've ridden on calm days and in gale-force winds. I've ridden in sunshine and in rain. I've even ridden in hail. Only if the roads are ice-covered is the event canceled (for obvious reasons). Actually, no sooner did I type these words than I remembered the Fort Worth bike rally of May 1995. The night before, a devastating hailstorm struck the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Many cars and house roofs (including mine) were destroyed. When I got to the rally site the next morning in my hail-damaged Grand Am, I learned that the rally had been canceled. Evidently, there was too much debris—such as tree limbs—on the roads. I'm still driving the hail-damaged car, by the way. It'll be fifteen years old in August.

Today's rally began under sunny skies. The forecast since at least Monday was for storms. Even today's newspaper called for storms. My friends and I laughed at the incompetence of the weather forecasters. But they were right. An hour or so into the ride, the sky clouded up. Then the wind picked up. It was a northerly wind, too, which meant cold, dry air. I grew increasingly cold as I pedaled. Rain began to fall, but only for a few minutes. I hadn't expected the change in the weather or I would have worn a long-sleeved shirt under my jersey. The wind was the worst part. It was brutal. My pace slowed to a crawl. People were putting their bikes into "sag wagons," which is an admission of defeat. I just concentrated on turning the pedals over. I knew from experience that all bad things must come to an end, and this one, mercifully, did.

I didn't bother partaking of the festivities on the town square. I rode straight to my car, packed up, and headed for home. The sky was dark and ominous. We went from spring to winter during the course of a four-hour ride. That's Texas for you. Ordinarily, it's so hot at the end of a rally that I turn the car's air-conditioner on. Today I fired up the heater. It was good to get home and take a hot shower, followed by a long nap. Sad to say, but this may have been my slowest rally ever. It was a difficult sixty-one miles. But I had fun. I've already filtered out the pain. I'll be back in Lancaster a year from now, ready for more of that strange admixture of suffering and joy that every bicyclist loves.

Here is a review, by the indefatigable Christopher Hitchens, of a new critical edition of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Enjoy!

"Sport" has no clear, commonly acknowledged use. It is reasonable to suppose that it covers whatever is dealt with in the sports pages of newspapers and magazines. But these also contain reports on bridge and chess, which it would be odd to call "sports."

Hockey demands bodily exertion. Like every other sport, it tests what a rule-abiding man can bodily be and do. Though chess also has rules, and these have a history, and though a masterly game makes considerable demands on the stamina of the players, chess is not a sport because it does not test what a man is as a body. Mind and body more or less reverse their roles in these two cases. In hockey judgment and determination are subservient to bodily achievement, but in chess the body is used only to make possible a more effective judgment and determination.

(Paul Weiss, Sport: A Philosophic Inquiry [Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971 (1969)], 132, 142-3)

Self-evident, adj. Evident to one's self and to nobody else.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

A few days ago (see here), I described Bart Giamatti's taxonomy of play. Giamatti defined "contest" as a competitive game. There are, he said, two types of contest: intellectual and physical. Physical contests are sports. I wrote that chess and checkers exemplify the category of intellectual contests and that baseball and bicycle racing exemplify the category of physical contests (sports).

To my surprise, three or four people wrote to say that chess is a sport. (See here, for example.) They said that it requires endurance and that it causes an elevated heart rate and perspiration. I assume they would say the same about marathon Monopoly, Scrabble, checkers, or card-playing sessions. Is high-stakes poker a sport? I'm sure it gets the players' hearts racing.

Monopoly and card-playing are not sports, and, with all due respect to my correspondents, chess isn't, either. The tone of the letters suggests that classifying chess as an intellectual contest rather than as a sport is insulting. But why? What's wrong with intellectual contests? Dividing contests into those that are intellectual and those that are physical isn't to rank them in a hierarchy, any more than to divide humanity into male and female is to rank them in a hierarchy. Two things can be different but equal. Baseball is better than chess, but not because it's a sport.

What I actually said in my post, as a reader pointed out in my defense, is that there are two types of contest: those that are purely intellectual and those that are both intellectual and physical. Every physical contest has an intellectual component or dimension, so defining a category of purely physical contests would create an empty category. I suppose it's also true that any intellectual contest has a physical component or dimension. We're embodied beings, after all. Any competition is going to affect one's body. Playing cards all night requires endurance. Tense moments in Scrabble, checkers, or bridge make one sweat and cause one's heart rate to increase.

So where do we draw the line? How physical does a contest have to be to count as a sport? Different people will draw the line in different places, depending, perhaps, on which physical attributes they think are most important. Is it strength? Speed? Quickness? Endurance? Agility?

It's an abuse of language to call chess a sport. It's not an abuse of language to call golf a sport, although I consider golf a borderline case and am inclined to classify it as an intellectual contest. Chess is not even borderline. It's a paradigmatic nonsport. Indeed, I would consider it a defect in any taxonomy that it classifies chess as a sport, just as I would consider it a defect in any taxonomy that it classifies bicycle racing as a nonsport.

Bill Keezer is discovering his inner blogger. See here for his latest provocative posts. I hope you're visiting his blog on a regular basis. The best blogs, like the best teachers, both edify and entertain.

I'd like to thank all the people who sent birthday greetings. I wasn't fishing for greetings, but I'll take 'em.

To the Editor:

I applaud Princeton University for trying to rein in grade inflation (news article, April 8). But its proposed quota for A's (35 percent of all grades, down from 47 percent) will not address the underlying problem.

Where college grades used to be critical only for those going on to graduate or professional schools, now students applying for jobs send transcripts to potential employers. The result is students badgering instructors to raise their grades, and faculty and graduate assistants trying to help their students' prospects.

If college career offices stopped encouraging students to make their grades part of the job-hunting process, perhaps students would stop credentialing themselves and get back to the business of learning.

AMANDA I. SELIGMAN
Glendale, Wis., April 8, 2004
The writer is an assistant professor, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Paul Krugman is trying to have it both ways. He wants to blame President Bush when economic indicators are down, but not praise him when they're up. See here. But then, liberals have never been known for their honesty, have they? The thing you must remember about liberals is that, for all their talk of principle, they're result-oriented. The end justifies the means. To achieve their social-engineering goals, they must have power; and they will do whatever it takes, including lie, to get that power. Take my word for it: I used to be one of them. I know how they think.

Writing from the perspective of traditional Christianity will already make [my] project suspect to much of the audience I would like to reach. I intend the book for two groups and their intersection: both for those who call themselves Christians, or at least take the claims of Christianity seriously, and for those interested in the academic study of ethics. This makes the project problematic, since many of those who fall into the second group find the attitudes and commitments of the first group incomprehensible or, if comprehensible, entirely unattractive. From the perspective of the academic study of ethics, it can seem that belief in traditional Christianity is possible for the uneducated, perhaps even desirable; but that for those who are fully alive to the movement of thought over the last two hundred years, it is no longer a serious option.

I believe, however, that a strong case can be made that this attitude within academic philosophy has led to a bad misreading of the great philosophical texts on which academic philosophy depends. I have an advantage here from an accident of my education. I did Greats at Oxford, in which the syllabus took a leap from Aristotle to Frege; and then a Ph.D. in the Classical Philosophy programme at Princeton, in which I read nothing between Aristotle's medieval commentators and Bradley. 'Modern' philosophy is therefore something I have read on my own, directly from the primary sources. I have been constantly struck by how often the Christian content of these sources has been ignored by the standard interpretations in the secondary literature. This is notably true of Kant, as I shall try to show. His system does not work unless he is seen as genuinely trying to 'make room for faith'. Failure to see this has led to heroic measures, either excising portions of text as not properly 'critical', or attributing his views to a desire to appease the pious sentiments of his faithful manservant. What is true of Kant is also true of Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz, and even Hume. We are given a reading of modern philosophy that leads from its birth in the new science of the sixteenth century to its maturation in the death of God and the death of metaphysics. Descartes is seen as an incipient atheist, bringing in God not because of personal faith but to appease the Church. Large sections of Leviathan, where Hobbes talks about the will of God, are ignored as though they were inessential to the project of the whole. In Bertrand Russell's critical exposition of the philosophy of Leibniz, God appears in none of the five original axioms. Hume is seen at the end of the Dialogues as insincere in portraying Philo's change of heart. It is no doubt tempting, if you cannot take Christianity seriously yourself, to interpret your favourite philosophers as sharing this distaste; but it leads to a distortion of the texts. Those engaged in the academic study of ethics ought to try the experiment of seeing what the world looks like from the perspective of traditional Christianity, even if merely to understand their own tradition. This book can be seen as such an experiment.

(John E. Hare, The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God's Assistance, Oxford Studies in Theological Ethics [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996], 2-3)

I'm forty-seven years old today. Every year, when my birthday comes around, I whine about not wanting to get older. It's not fair, I say. I refuse to get older. Who set things up this way?

But life is not fair. It's not unfair, either. It just is. We're born; we plod along; we die. If we're lucky, we have fun along the way. If we're really lucky, as I am, we get to spend our days doing exactly as we please. Sometimes I have to pinch myself to ensure that I'm not dreaming. You mean they pay me to read, write, think, and teach? I would do all but the teaching part for free. (Don't tell the dean!)

When I was twenty, I would have thought someone forty-seven years of age old. But now that I'm forty-seven, I think twenty-year olds are children. They know nothing; they've experienced nothing; they have no perspective on even their own small region of spacetime. And yet they think they know everything. It's funny, really. As you age, you realize how little you know and how little you'll ever know. This isn't to say you shouldn't try to learn, only that you should be humble about it. Learn what you can; accept your limitations.

If I'm lucky, I'll have another thirty years in this vale of tears (to use Jeremy Bentham's term). The first thirty years of my life seemed to take forever, probably because there were so many big events along the way. High-school graduation, the first job, the first car, college, graduation from college, law school, the bar exam, graduate school, the Ph.D. dissertation, the first job. Once I got tenure, the temporal slide began. The past ten years have gone by in a flash. My life, like Immanuel Kant's, is filled with pleasant routines. Every day is full. I have never been bored for a minute in my life. But now that all the big events are over, there's nothing to stop the flow of time. If twenty years ago seems like yesterday, then tomorrow is 2024 and the day after that 2044.

I envy theists, for they believe that life is eternal. I've never believed that and couldn't if I tried. I have a finite amount of days. I believe I value each of them more than any theist does for the simple reason that they're finite. If you have an infinite amount of something, how valuable can it be? Water is more valuable in Arizona than in Michigan. Nor do I believe that this mundane life is preparation for something greater. It's all I have. But it's enough. More than enough. I've had a wonderful life. If I die tonight, do not mourn for me. Celebrate. Celebrate my demise if you must, but celebrate.

To the Editor:

Re "Tracking Terrorist Bankrolls" (editorial, April 4):

Ending terrorist financing is a top priority for President Bush. The president's budget includes a more than 16 percent increase for the Treasury Department and a 5 percent increase for Internal Revenue Service criminal investigation activities. In fact, more than 400 special agents and more than 200 investigative analysts will be added for I.R.S. criminal investigations in 2005 alone.

The global campaign to find and seize terrorists' blood money uses the strengths of multiple agencies strategically. The interagency team, which includes the Treasury, State, Justice, Defense and Homeland Security Departments, the intelligence community, the F.B.I., federal regulators, and state and local authorities, has achieved many successes.

President Bush has made the battle against terror financing a front-burner issue worldwide and has led a global coalition in the identification and disruption of terrorist financing networks around the world. As a result, America is safer and more secure from those who would harm us.

ROBERT NICHOLS
Asst. Secretary for Public Affairs
Department of the Treasury
Washington, April 5, 2004

France and Germany are the big cheeses of what Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has described as "Old Europe." An undiplomatic phrase? Perhaps. But judging by the current state of affairs in both countries, the designation "old"—as in crabby, feeble and resistant to change—is apt.

The governments of President Jacques Chirac and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder are dealing with widespread public discontent, stemming in large part from persistently high unemployment and sluggish economic growth. Yet the public remains stubbornly defiant in the face of attempts to rein in generous social spending by the vast welfare state bureaucracies. The French and the Germans no longer can afford their welfare states, yet they can't bring themselves to abandon them.

There's a French word for what grips both nations: malaise. It's a word commentators used to describe the speech that Jimmy Carter delivered to a national TV audience in July 1979—an address that recognized the crisis of confidence then paralyzing America. There's a straight line from the malaise speech to the election of Ronald Reagan 16 months later, which restored America's self-confidence and brought about painful but necessary reforms (as Britain had embraced earlier with the election of Margaret Thatcher).

We will see if there are any Reagans or Thatchers in France and Germany. In the meantime, we Americans should learn the lessons of our allies' crises. In an era of globalization, reality will wash away economic and social structures that seemed permanent. If France and Germany don't find ways to embrace reform and arrest decline, they will write one more lesson into the history books: Old nations never die; they just fade away.

Friendship, n. A ship big enough to carry two in fair weather, but only one in foul.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Most of us experience morality as a burden. It constrains our actions. It tells us either not to do what we'd like to do or to do what we don't want to do. Morality is like a parent, a boss, or a drill sergeant: stern, demanding, unforgiving. For better or for worse, we cannot escape it. Making moral judgments is in our nature, and having moral judgments made about one—or one's actions—is inescapable. We are hard-wired to think in terms of right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust. We are moral animals.

Every now and then, however, morality and self-interest converge. It's wonderful—and remarkable—when they do, as this snippet from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn shows:

By and by it was getting-up time. So I come down the ladder and started for down-stairs; but as I come to the girls' room the door was open, and I see Mary Jane setting by her old hair trunk, which was open and she'd been packing things in it—getting ready to go to England. But she had stopped now with a folded gown in her lap, and had her face in her hands, crying. I felt awful bad to see it; of course anybody would. I went in there and says:

"Miss Mary Jane, you can't a-bear to see people in trouble, and I can't—most always. Tell me about it."

So she done it. And it was the niggers—I just expected it. She said the beautiful trip to England was most about spoiled for her; she didn't know how she was ever going to be happy there, knowing the mother and the children warn't ever going to see each other no more—and then busted out bitterer than ever, and flung up her hands, and says:

"Oh, dear, dear, to think they ain't ever going to see each other any more!"

"But they will—and inside of two weeks—and I know it!" says I.

Laws, it was out before I could think! And before I could budge she throws her arms around my neck and told me to say it again, say it again, say it again!

I see I had spoke too sudden and said too much, and was in a close place. I asked her to let me think a minute; and she set there, very impatient and excited and handsome, but looking kind of happy and eased-up, like a person that's had a tooth pulled out. So I went to studying it out. I says to myself, I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in a tight place is taking considerable many resks, though I ain't had no experience, and can't say for certain; but it looks so to me, anyway; and yet here's a case where I'm blest if it don't look to me like the truth is better and actuly safer than a lie. I must lay it by in my mind, and think it over some time or other, it's so kind of strange and unregular. I never see nothing like it. Well, I says to myself at last, I'm a-going to chance it; I'll up and tell the truth this time, though it does seem most like setting down on a kag of powder and touching it off just to see where you'll go to. (Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn [Toronto: Bantam Books, 1981], chap. XXVIII, pp. 179-80 [italics in original] [first published in 1884])

Huck could not believe that doing the right thing and doing what was in his interest converged in this case. It was "strange and unregular." Well, here's another case. Becoming a vegetarian (or moving in that direction by eliminating certain animal products from your diet) is both the right thing to do and the prudent thing to do. By ceasing to eat meat, you both refuse to participate in an oppressive institution and improve your health. You can become a vegetarian both for the sake of the animals (the moral reason) and for your sake (the prudential reason).

I hope nobody thinks meat-eating is healthy. If you do, then you have not been keeping up with the science of nutrition. Not only is meat-eating not healthy; it's unhealthy. It sets back your interest in health, and therefore your ulterior interest in a long, happy life. See here for a statement by the American Dietetic Association, which is a nonpartisan organization. Live clean. Do right. Vegetarianism accomplishes both.

This is a test. Until tonight, I was unable to get curved quotation marks, accents, and other special symbols in my blog entries. I have two ways to compose: (1) in a Microsoft Word document, using the copy-and-paste function to transfer the text to Blogger; and (2) in Blogger. I know how to insert accents in a Word document, but when I pasted the text to Blogger, the accented letters appeared as trash. The same happened with the curved quotation marks that I use in Word documents. What I ended up doing is turning off the curved-quotation-marks function in every blog entry I composed, then turning it back on afterward. Needless to say, this was annoying and time-consuming.

Tonight I decided to do something about it. I began by asking John Ray, who has been so helpful to me during the past five months. John mentioned tinkering with the settings in Blogger. When I went in, I saw that my encoding was set to "Universal (Unicode UTF-8)." There were many other choices, but only one looked promising: Western (Windows-1252). To make a long story short, I changed the setting and tried copying accents and curved quotation marks to Blogger. It worked! Thanks, John.

Here, as a further test, are some special symbols:

cliché
raison d'être
vis-à-vis
10° Fahrenheit
89¢
7¾ feet

I hope they come through!

To drop the notion of the philosopher as knowing something about knowing which nobody else knows so well would be to drop the notion that his voice always has an overriding claim on the attention of the other participants in the conversation. It would also be to drop the notion that there is something called "philosophical method" or "philosophical technique" or "the philosophical point of view" which enables the professional philosopher, ex officio, to have interesting views about, say, the respectability of psychoanalysis, the legitimacy of certain dubious laws, the resolution of moral dilemmas, the "soundness" of schools of historiography or literary criticism, and the like. Philosophers often do have interesting views upon such questions, and their professional training as philosophers is often a necessary condition for their having the views they do. But this is not to say that philosophers have a special kind of knowledge about knowledge (or anything else) from which they draw relevant corollaries. The useful kibitzing they can provide on the various topics I just mentioned is made possible by their familiarity with the historical background of arguments on similar topics, and, most importantly, by the fact that arguments on such topics are punctuated by stale philosophical cliches which the other participants have stumbled across in their reading, but about which professional philosophers know the pros and cons by heart.

(Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979], 392-3 [italics in original])

I thought I had my spam problem solved. The other day I downloaded and installed the newest version of EarthLink's SpamBlocker, which has a challenge-response feature. But it doesn't work just as I want it to, so I've disabled it. Here's the problem. I have twelve names in my Outlook Express "contacts" list. I like to keep this list simple. It has the names of people to whom I write often, such as my mother and my bicycling friends. Anyone on the "contacts" list who writes to me gets through without having to do the challenge-response thing. If you're not on the "contacts" list, your e-mail to me gets stored in the "suspect email" folder on EarthLink's server. I can see how many messages are in this folder by clicking the SpamBlocker logo in Outlook Express.

Suppose I see that there's a message and go to EarthLink's server to see what it is. It's from X, one of my blog correspondents. What I'd like to do is say, "Let this person's mail get through to me." But all I can do is say, "Let it get through to me and add the person to my 'contacts' list." I don't want to add everyone to my "contacts" list! I want to keep it simple. My only alternative is to click "Send message to inbox without adding person to 'contacts' list." You guessed it. The next time X writes to me, he or she has to do the challenge-response thing again.

Do you see my predicament? I want to let certain people's messages get through to me, but not by adding them to my "contacts" list. Maybe I'll write to EarthLink. It seems like a simple thing to change, and I'll bet I'm not the only person who dislikes this feature.

By the way, I apologize to those of you who had to respond to a challenge more than once. It's my fault, since I didn't add you to my "contacts" list. To make things worse, I lost several e-mail messages this afternoon. I thought I sent them to my inbox, but they disappeared. If you sent something to me, please resend it.

Steve Headley has an interesting post on tax cuts over at Texas Conservative. I agree with Steve that tax cuts stimulate economic growth. It's common sense. But we must not lose sight of an important principle, to wit: People are entitled to the fruits of their labor. So there are two arguments for tax cuts: the consequentialist argument, which says that tax cuts have good consequences, and the deontological argument, which says that people have a right to retain the fruits of their labor even if this does not have good consequences, indeed, even if it has bad consequences. Suppose it is shown that tax cuts do not stimulate economic growth. This undercuts only the consequentialist argument.

I wish the Bush administration would articulate the deontological argument. It's important. The Bush administration has done a poor job in general of articulating its principles, explaining its policies, and justifying its decisions. The case for war in Iraq, for example, is manifold. There are at least five good reasons to have gone to war, no one of which is necessary but any one of which is sufficient. The administration made far too much of the so-called weapons of mass destruction. Now it's paying the price for that single-mindedness. The lesson is simple: Don't put all your justificatory eggs in one basket.

I chuckled when I read this post by Bill Keezer over at Bill's Comments. I, too, like watching things being built. Just today I watched from the third floor of my office building (Carlisle Hall) as workers prepared the foundation of a new campus building. Years ago, I had a bird's-eye view of the Chemistry Building going up. For a while I was looking down, then straight across, then up. I'm mechanically incompetent, so every building seems to me to be a miracle.

Re: "Terrorists prefer Bush," by John Godbey, Thursday Letters.

John Godbey opines that George Bush "will keep the flames of hatred against America burning in the Muslim world."

Mr. Godbey doesn't get it. The Muslim world does not need George Bush to engender hatred against America. They teach it in their schools every day. If John Kerry gets elected president, the Muslims won't hate us any less; they will just respect us less.

William L. Haralson, Richardson

Truth, n. An ingenious compound of desirability and appearance. Discovery of truth is the sole purpose of philosophy, which is the most ancient occupation of the human mind and has a fair prospect of existing with increasing activity to the end of time.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Kevin over at Big Hominid's Hairy Chasms has a nice tribute to his parents on their thirty-seventh wedding anniversary. See here. The family that laughs together stays together.

As many of you know, I stopped eating red meat (beef, pork, venison, &c) in early 1981. I gave up turkey, as planned, on the last day of 1981. Since then, the only animal products I've ingested are chicken, fish, and eggs. (I've been allergic to dairy products since 1972.) A couple of years ago I stopped eating chicken. More recently still, I ruled out eggs from confined hens. As of today, the only animal products I ingest are (1) fish and (2) eggs from free-roaming hens.

Do I live up to my moral standards? No. But I'm close, and that should count for something. A few years ago, in correspondence with several philosopher friends, I was taken to task by one of them for continuing to eat chicken and fish. He couldn't believe I hadn't gone all the way (cold turkey, whole hog). He said it was preposterous for me to think I was doing well. "Imagine someone saying that he commits only an occasional rape," he said. The implication, of course, is that rape is unacceptable. It's not good enough to reduce the number of rapes one commits (unless the reduction is to zero).

One virtue of my friend's analogy is that it brings individual animals into the picture. The flesh one eats comes from individual animals, not from a species, a population, or a collection. Each rape is an affront to the dignity of a distinct person. Each act of consuming steak, hamburger, or a chicken leg is an affront to the dignity of a distinct animal. We tend to think of chicken as a mass term, like peanut butter, but it refers to body parts of individual chickens.

My friend's criticism stung me, and it has bothered me ever since. Am I no better than the rapist who "cuts back" on the number of victims? Does my sense that I'm doing better than most people and better than I once did rest on sand? Am I deluding myself?

I don't think I'm deluding myself, and I hope I'm not deluding myself by thinking that I'm not deluding myself. Suppose I were a rapist, and suppose I had been raping five women a month for many years. If I cut back to two women a month, I'd be doing better than I was. There are fewer victims. Clearly, I should not be raping at all, but raping twenty-four women a year is morally better than raping sixty a year. Would my friend disagree?

He would probably say, "You shouldn't be raping any women!" But I can agree with that without giving up my belief that I'm doing better now than before. The two judgments—one comparative and one noncomparative—are compatible. My friend seemed unwilling to address the comparative claim. He's a purist. To him, there are just two choices: (1) rape at will and (2) don't rape at all. By analogy, (1) eat as much meat as you want, of whatever types you want, and (2) don't eat meat at all.

There's a lot of purism (my term) in the animal-liberation movement. Anyone who hasn't purged animal products from his or her diet is viewed with skepticism (at best) or animosity (at worst). I wonder why this is. Why not celebrate each incremental movement toward veganism? After all, most of us grew up eating meat. Is it reasonable to expect people to eliminate animal products from their diets overnight, or even over the course of a year? There's a learning curve, for one thing. Vegetarian diets require new cooking skills and a better understanding of nutrition. There's also this brute fact: People enjoy the taste of meat. Perhaps they shouldn't (if that makes sense), but they do; and we're talking about changing lifelong habits. Dietary habits are especially difficult to change, since food plays such an important role in our rituals and identities. (I'll write about that in another post.)

If you're a vegan, like my friend, be reasonable. Rape is abominable. But it's better for one woman to be raped than for two to be raped. This doesn't justify or excuse the rape; it simply compares two states of the world in terms of the individuals that compose those states. Eating only fish is better than eating all meats. Eating only eggs from free-roaming hens is better than eating just any eggs. It seems like common sense, but then, philosophers are not long on common sense.

Thanks to Matthew in his post of 4/5 for letting readers know where to find Smullyan's version of the philosopher's dream. I didn't get it from Smullyan. I got it by word of mouth, and (although I may be mistaken) I believe that it was current before 1983.

Matthew thinks that I used the story to dodge the issue. What issue was that? The post I was responding to [see here] didn't contain any arguments, only opinions. But, as I used to tell my students, unsupported opinions have (as Russell was wont to say) all the advantages of theft over honest toil.

Len Carrier

There are many branches of methodical inquiry into the different departments of the world. There are the mathematical sciences, the several natural sciences, and there are the humane or human studies of anthropology, jurisprudence, philosophy, the linguistic and literary studies, and history, which last embraces in one way or another most of the others. There are also many disciplines which teach not truths but arts and skills, such as agriculture, tactics, music, architecture, painting, games, navigation, inference, and scientific method. All theories apply their own several principles and canons of inquiry and all disciplines apply their own several principles and canons of practice. These principles were called by Professor [Robin George] Collingwood [1889-1943] their 'presuppositions'. In other words, all employ their own standards or criteria by which their particular exercises are judged successful or unsuccessful.

Now it is one thing intelligently to apply principles; it is quite another thing to step back to consider them. A scientist who ceases for a moment to try to solve his questions in order to inquire instead why he poses them or whether they are the right questions to pose ceases for the time to be a scientist and becomes a philosopher. This duality of interests may, as history shows, make him both a good philosopher and a better scientist. The best philosophical theories of mathematics have come from mathematicians who have been forced to try to resolve internal puzzles about the principles of their study, a philosophical exercise which has sometimes led to the origination of new mathematical methods and has often led to the origination of illuminating philosophical views. Every genius is the inventor of new methods and he must therefore be some sort of a critic of principles of method.

Professor Collingwood [Ryle's predecessor as Waynflete Chair of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford University] was an historian who was puzzled about the canons of historical research. He wanted not only to explain certain historical processes and events but also to elucidate what sort of a thing a good historical explanation would be. Nor was this a purely domestic or technological interest. For to see what is an historical explanation, is, among other things, to see how it differs from a chemical, mechanical, biological, anthropological, or psychological theory. The philosopher may, perhaps, begin by wondering about the categories constituting the framework of a single theory or discipline, but he cannot stop there. He must try to co-ordinate the categories of all theories and disciplines. The problem of 'Man's place in Nature' is, roughly, the problem of coordinating the questions which govern laboratory researches with the questions governing the researches prosecuted in libraries. And this co-ordination is done neither in libraries nor in laboratories but in the philosopher's head.

Professor Collingwood saw more clearly, I think, than did his most eminent predecessors in the philosophy of history that the appearance of a feud or antithesis between Nature and Spirit, that is to say, between the objectives of the natural sciences and those of the human studies, is an illusion. These branches of inquiry are not giving rival answers to the same questions about the same world; nor are they giving separate answers to the same questions about rival worlds; they are giving their own answers to different questions about the same world. Just as physics is neither the foe nor the handmaid of geometry, so history, jurisprudence and literary studies are neither hostile nor ancillary to the laboratory sciences. Their categories, that is, their questions, methods and canons are different. In my predecessor's word, they work with different presuppositions.

(Gilbert Ryle, Philosophical Arguments [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945], 3-4 [this essay is Ryle's Inaugural Lecture as Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy, delivered before the University of Oxford on 30 October 1945])

Edible, adj. Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Dr John J. Ray ("You can call me Ray; you can call me J.; you can call me R. J.; you can call me J. Ray"), my polymathic friend Down Under, has a new blog devoted to the politicization of the environmental movement. See here. (I've also added a permanent link to the left, in, fittingly, the green area.) Sadly, science often takes a back seat to politics when it comes to understanding and protecting the natural environment. John is a no-nonsense defender of science and common sense. Please visit his new blog. He says he will post to it daily. John's main blog, of course, is Dissecting Leftism. Your day is not complete without a liberal dose of the conservative Dr Ray.

Dr. Carrier might wish to provide a citation for his philosopher dream story [see here], as the original author probably deserves credit. It comes from Raymond Smullyan's 5000 B.C. and Other Philosophical Fantasies (St. Martin's Press, 1983). The story is "A Universal Philosophical Refutation." You can find it here. I found the book to be an interesting and funny read.

By the way, another nice dodge of the issue by Carrier.

Matthew

To the Editor:

Re "TV Shows Take On Bush, and Pull Few Punches" (front page, April 2):

Like most people, I watch less and less network TV because of the violence and sexual content; these attacks on the president just give me another reason to flip over to something less offensive.

Frankly, I don't believe that TV writers should be attacking the president, regardless of party. Not because he is above reproach, but because I believe that this gives a writer a forum in which to express his opinion (almost always liberal).

And contrary to comments about presenting both sides, I haven't seen Hollywood do that in its TV shows.

Why can't these producers and writers just put together entertaining programs and leave the politics to the news media and opinion makers? Middle America is turned off by Hollywood types' using their positions to influence public opinion.

With the networks struggling to retain their shrinking audiences, you would think that they would want to avoid offending people and work on making programs of interest.

DENNIS VEST
Gates, Tenn., April 2, 2004

Professors do a funny thing. When they list their academic affiliation on their curriculum vitae (CV), they put "Current Position." The implication is that it's temporary. It screams out, "I don't plan to be at this embarrassing place for long!" It says the person in question is better than the job he or she has. It expresses frustration, envy, even resentment. Imagine some other applications of this principle:

Current residence.
Current citizenship.
Current crime record.
Current wife (or husband).

There does seem to be a lot of mobility within the professoriate. Everyone is on the make and on the move, trying to climb the ladder to the top. Ambition reigns. Status rules. Not in a top-twenty program? Get going! Not yet a star professor? You're not working hard enough! The professor's mantra is "Have Ph.D., will travel." The impolite name for this is "mercenary."

I once fell victim to this onward-and-upward mentality. It's engrained in graduate students. Then, one day, I asked why I would want to go anywhere else. I'm happy where I am. I have all the research-related resources I need; I have great colleagues (including our secretary, Billie); I have a reasonable teaching load; I get all the courses I want to teach, when and where I want to teach them; and I like the campus facilities. As if all this weren't enough, I'm delighted with the nonacademic aspects of my life. I live west of the Mississippi (which, perverse as it sounds, means a lot to me); I have a warm-weather climate, which makes for mild winters; I have all the athletic opportunities I want; and, not insignificantly, the cost of living is low (Texas has no state income tax).

It amazes me when people uproot their families and leave their friends to get an incrementally higher-paying or more prestigious job. Some professors move across country. Some move several times in a decade. Thank goodness I got that questing out of my system long ago. I'm content with what I have. Are you?

Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated on this date in 1968. He was thirty-nine years old when he died, which would make him seventy-five now. I wonder what he would say about affirmative-action programs for African-Americans, programs that (1) imply that blacks can't make it on their own and (2) make every black accomplishment suspect. I like to think he would condemn them, as all of us should. They are an insult to a proud people. By the way, if you haven't listened to U2's "MLK," from the album The Unforgettable Fire (1984), please do so. Here are the lyrics (taken from the band's website):

Sleep, sleep tonight
And may your dreams be realised.
If the thunder cloud passes rain
So let it rain, rain down on he.
So let it be.
So let it be.

Sleep, sleep tonight
And may your dreams be realised.
If the thunder cloud passes rain
So let it rain, let it rain
Rain down on he.

Will miracles never cease? The other day (see here), I complained about Mailblocks, to which I subscribed but which I could not get working. I was denied a refund even though nobody at the company would help me. Don't waste your money with Mailblocks. The company's ineptitude and disrespect will be its undoing. The marketplace is (and should be) unforgiving.

A few minutes ago, I sent e-mail to my friend Bill Keezer via his blog, Bill's Comments. To my surprise, I got an e-mail message in reply. Not from Bill, but from his Internet service provider (ISP). Although Bill has a Mindspring e-mail address, the message was from EarthLink. It asked me to type a few letters into a box to prove that I'm a human being and not a robot. I happily did so. I assume my mail has now gotten through to Bill.

But that got me to wondering. It appears that EarthLink has the sort of spam blocker I hoped Mailblocks would provide. EarthLink happens to be my ISP, so I snooped around and discovered (see here) that EarthLink has released a beta version of SpamBlocker that challenges mail senders to respond. Yeehaa! I installed the program in no time. I sent myself a message and, sure enough, it was directed to my "Suspect Email" box on EarthLink's server. There's a box on Outlook Express that I can click at any time to see which messages have been redirected. If I see one that should get through, such as the daily New York Times summary, I can click a box and have it sent through to me from now on. The program puts me in charge of my e-mail. I am no longer at the mercy of spammers.

I apologize to those of you who send e-mail. You'll have to take a few seconds the first time to type the letters into the box. It'll save me a lot of grief with spam. Thank you, EarthLink! Now I don't feel so bad about my experience with Mailblocks.

Ever wonder whether a conservative can believe in animal rights? See here.

I hope you're reading Steve Headley's Texas Conservative blog every day. Steve, as I've said before, is hard-hitting but fair. He's also funny, as this shows.

Peg Kaplan has been on a blog roll since getting that dang bridge out of her system. See here for some incisive posts.

To the Editor:

Your March 29 editorial "A Misleading Fetal Violence Law" is an example of the doublethink apparent in much of the opposition to the Unborn Victims of Violence Act.

You say that "it is safe to say that no one in the Senate needed to be convinced that attacks on pregnant women are horrific." But why are such attacks horrific? Is the pregnant woman herself somehow more valuable than a nonpregnant woman? Could it be that there is something else that makes a crime against a pregnant woman worse?

The answer is that when a pregnant woman is assaulted, there are two victims instead of one. The state has a compelling interest in increasing penalties for an attack on more than one person. Even supporters of abortion rights understand that on some level.

I don't deny that the law can and will be used politically to undermine "abortion rights." That does not mean, however, that a good law should not be passed because of these political considerations.

SCOTT TIBBS
Bloomington, Ind., March 29, 2004

Keith Burgess-Jackson has been kind enough to let me post my arguments protesting the Iraq war on his blog. I thank him again for the opportunity to do this.

Was I out to convince those of differing beliefs that I was right? [See here.] No, I never had such hopes. All I wanted to do was to allow "the other side" to view the arguments arrayed against them, so that they might express their own countering arguments in as consistent and rigorous a fashion as possible. Good arguments, after all, are the lifeblood of philosophy.

Keith expresses our differences as that of employing different standards of justification. I would put the matter somewhat differently. R. M. Hare spoke of differing worldviews as those in which people have a different "Blik." I think that Keith and I have a different Blik. We assess evidence in the same way, but our worldviews differ, and we therefore interpret the evidence in a way that supports our own worldview. I can therefore agree that, unless one or the other of us can point out how the evidence clashes with the other's Blik, there can be no traction gained by either party, and no change of mind.

My own Blik is based on the scientific method, not on faith, optimism, patriotism, or political persuasion. I'm therefore ready to give up any belief that I hold, whatever it concerns, if it can be shown to be more likely false rather than true. As for those matters where the evidence does not speak clearly, I'm ready to confess ignorance. I don't know what Blik Keith adheres to, but I suspect that it is not the one that Peirce adopted as being the best way of fixing belief, that of accepting only those hypotheses that have been tested by experience. But, then again, I might be mistaken.

Len Carrier

The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. — A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.

(Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R. J. Hollingdale [London: Penguin Books, 1970], 210 [italics in original] [first published in 1851])

Calamity, n. A more than commonly plain and unmistakable reminder that the affairs of this life are not of our own ordering. Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

At 10 a.m. last Sunday morning I stopped in at Whole Foods Preston-Forest to buy a few fresh breads for breakfast. She stood behind me in the "express" checkout lane. Her cart overflowed with a lot more than "10 items or less."

I mentioned to her that there was a customer with just one item behind her, and maybe she could let him check out ahead of her. She frowned, "I'm in a really big hurry," was her reply.

I said "Gee, that's a shame since he has just one item and he's holding his money in his hand." She pushed the cart forward toward me and, as it clanged into my basket, she stormed out of the store.

"I don't need to listen to this" were her angry words as she left her cart filled with milk cartons, packages of meats, produce, breads and other groceries. She stormed out of the store.

Last week while coming home from work, in 5 o'clock traffic on a Wednesday, I was maneuvering toward the Dallas North Tollway entrance lane from I-35 northbound. Suddenly, I see an SUV moving over on me—driving my small Toyota Prius. My choice is either be run off into a retaining rail or honk to alert the driver of my plight. I honked at the driver who had to let me pass and who ended up right behind me.

For the next several minutes she punished me with honking, obscene gestures and road-raged tailgating my vehicle. She pulled ahead of me, with more gestures along the way, cut me out in traffic and repeatedly hit her brake just to let me know how displeased she was that I honked at her. Then off she sped, sure that she had taught me a lesson as to her superiority.

Sisters, what's up with you? Both of you were white, middle-aged women—just like me. I got a good look at you both. You were well dressed. You have good surroundings judging by where you were shopping and the vehicle you drive. So, what's up with the rage?

I usually think of road-ragers and angry checkout line incidents as a "male thing." If either of you is reading this—please let me know why.

Kerrie Wolfson, Dallas

A reader (Cynthia) asks why I don't have a comments section on this blog. She says it will save me from having to post comments "by hand."

Newspapers don't publish just any letters that come in. Only some letters (usually a small percentage) get published, and even these are edited (though usually not enough). Think of this blog as a newspaper and me as its editor. By the way, I believe that the main shortcoming of the Internet is that it's unedited. Editors are filters of quality. Without editors, there is chaos (anarchy). Come to think of it, the Internet is chaotic. In some ways this is good. In some ways it is bad.

There are many reasons why I don't want a comments section. First, it draws my attention to the blog when I should be doing other things. Who can resist seeing what readers are saying? I had a comments section on my Animal Ethics blog when it was communal, so I know whereof I speak. It was a relief to get rid of it. I also get comments on my Tech Central Station columns. I check the feedback section several times a day for three or four days, until the comments stop coming in.

Second, it will draw me into controversies, which I don't need. I can barely find the time to post entries each day. Having several running debates with readers would undermine my blogging. David Hume (1711-1776) resolved as a young man never to respond to his critics, and with one or two exceptions, he didn't. I admire that. I almost always regret engaging my critics, some of whom are nasty. It's a distraction from the work I'm doing. I'm trying to simplify my life, not complicate it.

Third, people grandstand. This used to happen with e-mail. I would send a missive to six or eight people, not all of whom knew the others. Someone would invariably respond to all instead of just to me. I never understood this. I sent the missive to all because I know all. But the one who responded to all didn't know all! It was grandstanding, plain and simple. In some cases the responder sought to embarrass me in front of the others. That's despicable. There's also a fair amount of grandstanding in the feedback section of Tech Central Station. People have axes to grind. They grind away, oblivious to what I said in the column. People who have axes to grind should take up blogging. People who enjoy watching axes ground should read these blogs.

Fourth, I read recently that spammers have learned how to post advertisements on comments sections. The very idea infuriates me. Spammers should be hung by the neck until dead.

All things considered, I neither need nor want a comments section. I love my blog as it is. This is not to discourage you from writing to me. Far from it. A link to my e-mail address is prominently displayed to the left. Feel free to write. If I like your letter, I may ask for permission to post it (after editing for grammar, punctuation, style, and clarity). I read all letters, so even if I don't ask to post yours, it wasn't a waste of your time to compose it. Nor should you be insulted if I post someone else's letter and not yours. I try to post one letter a day, in the "From the Mailbag" feature. Sometimes I post two.

As many of you know, Dr Leonard Carrier, a retired philosophy professor from The University of Miami, has been making a case against the war in Iraq. His missives have been criticized by various others. Let's step back for a moment and ask what's going on. In other words, let's think philosophically about what we're doing. (The unexamined life is not worth living.)

Dr Carrier believes that the war in Iraq was unjustified. I and many others believe that it was justified. It's tempting to think that only one of us can be right. Dr Carrier believes p; we believe non-p. But that's incorrect. Dr Carrier and I may have different standards (norms) of justification. The war may be unjustified by his standard but justified by mine. Suppose we shared a standard. Then we could simply apply it and reach a mutually acceptable conclusion. A given standard either is or is not complied with in a particular case. Whether it is complied with is a factual question. Factual questions, in principle, are the easiest to answer.

The differences expressed in this blog are of two sorts. Some are factual, such as what the war cost, whether Saddam Hussein was a threat to others, or what the war's long-term consequences will be. But I think the correspondents have different standards of justification. This is a whole other matter.

Suppose Dr Carrier and I have different standards of justification (as I believe we do). Can anything be done? Yes. I can try to get Dr Carrier to replace his standard with my standard. How do I do this? I have to show him that something else he accepts, such as a more fundamental standard, commits him to it. He will try to do the same with me. Persuasion, to be effective, must be ad hominem. It must begin with beliefs or values already subscribed to by one's interlocutor. If my interlocutor rejects one or more of my premises, I get no traction with him or her and have no chance of changing his or her view.

It may come as a surprise to hear me say this, but I have no interest in persuading Dr Carrier or anyone else to share my view of the war's justification. I'm convinced that it's justified—by my standard of justification. I have a coherent view of the war in Iraq. I'm sure Dr Carrier has a coherent view as well. If Dr Carrier wants to change my view, he must show that I have contradictory beliefs, not merely that my beliefs differ from his.

I read jan's 4/3 post with interest. I was disappointed, however, in its being rather long on rhetoric and short on facts. Give me an argument to confront and I'll gladly discuss it. Give me opinion and conjecture and I can only respond with the following story.

A young philosopher dreamt that he was arguing with all the great philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, and others. One by one they came before him, and he devastated them with a singular criticism of their arguments. Becoming half-awake, he realized that he had discovered a universal refutation. Fearing that he would forget it upon fully awakening, he stumbled to his nightstand and wrote down the words he had uttered in his dream; and then he fell back asleep. In the morning he looked at what he had written on his writing pad. It contained the words, "That's what you say!"

Thank you for your opinions, jan.

Len Carrier

M. Ethan Katsh, "Rights, Camera, Action: Cyberspatial Settings and the First Amendment," The Yale Law Journal 104 (May 1995): 1681.

Charles B. Gray, "Alice in Wittgenstein: Inside the Great Mirror," Journal of Value Inquiry 29 (March 1995): 77.

Michael Tye, "What What It's Like Is Really Like," Analysis 55 (April 1995): 125.

"Jail, Jail, The Gang's All Here: Senate Crime Bill Section 521, the Criminal Street Gang Provision," Boston College Law Review 36 (May 1995): 527.

John Watkins, "How I Almost Solved the Problem of Induction," Philosophy 70 (July 1995): 429.

To the liberal mind, the end justifies the means. Think about what this signifies. The end is so important, so essential, that literally no means to achieving it are ruled out. Anything goes! This is as true in campaigning as it is in policymaking. If you doubt me, read this excerpt from an interview between a liberal Air America radio host and Ralph Nader, at Peg Kaplan's blog what if? As Peg says, scary.

Intimacy, n. A relation into which fools are providentially drawn for their mutual destruction.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Dr Bill Keezer over at Bill's Comments has posted a reply (see here) to Dr Leonard Carrier, whose carefully written missives in opposition to the war in Iraq have appeared on this blog. Bill just installed a visitor counter on his blog, which will allow us to watch his readership grow. Take a look. If you have a blog of your own, please give Bill a little publicity. New bloggers need the equivalent of a push to get started.

On the windy banks of the river Rhone I spent my boyhood, guided by my parents, and then, guided by my own fancies, the whole of my youth. Yet there were long intervals spent elsewhere, for I first passed four years at the little town of Carpentras, somewhat to the east of Avignon: in these two places I learned as much of grammar, logic, and rhetoric as my age permitted, or rather, as much as it is customary to teach in school: how little that is, dear reader, thou knowest. I then set out for Montpellier to study law, and spent four years there, then three at Bologna. I heard the whole body of the civil law, and would, as many thought, have distinguished myself later, had I but continued my studies. I gave up the subject altogether, however, so soon as it was no longer necessary to consult the wishes of my parents. My reason was that, although the dignity of the law, which is doubtless very great, and especially the numerous references it contains to Roman antiquity, did not fail to delight me, I felt it to be habitually degraded by those who practise it. It went against me painfully to acquire an art which I would not practise dishonestly, and could hardly hope to exercise otherwise. Had I made the latter attempt, my scrupulousness would doubtless have been ascribed to simplicity.

(Petrarch, "Letter to Posterity," in Selected Sonnets, Odes, and Letters, ed. Thomas Goddard Bergin, Crofts Classics, ed. Samuel H. Beer and O. B. Hardison Jr [Arlington Heights, IL: AHM Publishing Corporation, 1966], 1-17, at 4-5 [letter written about 1373])

To the Editor:

Re "The Evolution of Women's Roles, Chronicled in the Life of a Doll," by Carol E. Lee (Editorial Observer, March 30):

Once demonized as a 12-inch bimbo, the newly liberated Barbie is now extolled as a role model for generation ABC. Lighten up already!

When my 31-year-old son was 3, I bought into the feminist manifesto by buying him a doll to help him get in touch with his feminine side. At the same time, a friend bought her daughter a truck. To our dismay, both objects were ignored unless we visited each other's homes.

My daughter grew up with two brothers, surrounded by He-Man toys that held little interest for her. But she opted instead for a menagerie of homely Cabbage Patch dolls, followed by a long line of theme Barbies with all the requisite accessories.

If the adults who consider doll a four-letter word would try to get in touch with their inner child, they might conclude that any toy, whether it's a Barbie or a Mack Truck, ultimately represents whatever the child needs it to be. And sometimes a doll is just a doll.

HELEN SCHWIMME
Brooklyn, March 30, 2004

To the Editor:

It took a darling 2-year-old to get this radical feminist grandmother to extol the virtues of Barbie (Editorial Observer, March 30).

As a parent in the 1970's, I would have died before buying a Barbie for my little president in the making. Now I realize that all the to-do was just that, much ado about nothing.

I watch my granddaughter with this anatomically incorrect doll, and she has it talking, moving furniture, being a mother, singing songs, fixing a car and using its imagination.

Why is it that we don't get as upset about G.I. Joe, the doll that kills people and hardly nurtures, and is also anatomically incorrect?

And why is it that we don't get as upset when our daughters play with boys' toys as we do when our sons want girls' toys?

RENEE ROSENBLUM-LOWDEN
Columbia, Md., April 1, 2004

Here's the Democrat strategy, reduced to essentials:

1. Point out everything that's wrong with this country, from its laws to its customs to its history to its institutions to the attitudes, values, and beliefs of its inhabitants.

2. Blame everything that's bad, wrong, or unjust on President Bush.

3. Hope voters buy it.

Americans will tire of the first prong. They know that the United States is a good place in which to live. Many of us believe that it's the best place—ever. Is it perfect? No. No place is or ever will be perfect. Nothing humans make or do is perfect, with the possible exception of baseball.

By harping on the bad, Democrats will come to seem imbalanced, mean-spirited, and pessimistic, all of which go against the American grain. Americans are balanced, kind, and optimistic—and pride themselves on it. They know that every cloud has a silver lining. If you look hard enough, you'll find it. They believe that things are basically good and can be made only incrementally better—and that sometimes, trying to make things better ends up making them worse. (Americans do not like do-gooders.) When they hear Democrats say that America is rotten to the core, a place of injustice and indifference to misfortune, they will cast a wary eye. When is the last time we elected a pessimistic president? We threw one out on his ear in 1980.

The second prong violates American beliefs in honesty and fairness. President Bush, qua president, is a powerful man—more powerful than you or I—but he is not omnipotent. He is not responsible for everything bad, wrong, or unjust. He can't single-handedly create jobs. But if you listen to Democrats and read the screeds of, say, Paul Krugman, you can't but think that they believe President Bush both caused all the bad stuff to occur and stood in the way of all the good stuff. This is dishonest and unfair. Americans will see it and punish it.

The third prong is most insulting of all. Americans don't like being played for fools or taken for granted. They'll see that Democrats are playing fast and loose with the truth and hoping to dupe people into voting for them. They will take a hard look at John Kerry and see that he stands for appeasement of our enemies, higher taxes (punishment for success), less personal responsibility, and pandering to special interests. Are you a special interest? Neither am I. I'm just an ordinary, hard-working American, playing by the rules, taking responsibility for my actions, trying to be self-sufficient, and wishing that everyone else did the same.

Democrats care about welfare, not autonomy; liberty, not responsibility; equality, not desert. To a Democrat, you are an eater and a breeder, not a thinker or a doer. You are a patient, not an agent. You are assumed to be incapable, incompetent, and vulnerable without assistance from governmental do-gooders—who, of course, know what's best for you. You are defined by your needs, not by your interests, abilities, or values. If you're productive, you're ripe for the picking, however much your productivity rests on initiative, hard work, and discipline. This November's election will come down to two visions of what America is all about. Choose wisely.

One of my readers, Kelion, sent a link to this essay by John Kekes, who, as many of you know, is one of my philosophical heroes. (I have many.) Thanks, Kelion! I'm fairly sure I would not have discovered the essay on my own. By the way, in case you get a Kekes craving, here is another of his essays. I think you'll agree that the man is brilliant. Did I mention that he's a conservative?

I must say that Len Carrier [see here] still has not convinced me.

His alternative to sanctions or war, using other Arab states to apply diplomatic pressure, seems ungrounded in reality. The Arab states that weren't openly supporting Saddam, were tacitly supporting him, and rabidly anti-American in any case. Ditto much of Europe. France, Germany, and Russia at a minimum were on the take, and who knows how many other countries? Who could we have trusted to not stab us in the back, that Saddam would have listened to? Kuwait might have cooperated with us in good faith, but it's not likely that Saddam would have listened to them, since they called on us to kick him out in the first Gulf war. Turkey is both Muslim and democratic, but no Arab is going to listen to the Turks. Mr. Carrier also fails to understand that in order to negotiate with someone, you have to have something that they want. The only things that Saddam wanted were things we would never have ceded to him: elimination of Israel as a state, nuclear technology and long-range missiles, control of Kuwaiti and other Arab territories, elimination of the no-fly zones, etc. So what was there left to negotiate with? Nothing.

I don't understand his statement "Eventually, he would have fallen, perhaps earlier rather than later if tried and convicted in absentia by an international court." What international court? No court exists that has the jurisdiction to convict dictators of anything. And of course Saddam would have fallen eventually, he was mortal like the rest of us, so he would have died of old age if nothing else. Having a dictator fall, however, is only half of the equation, and not necessarily the important half. As important or more so, in my opinion, is who the dictator will be replaced with. Is Mr. Carrier seriously suggesting that the situation would have been better after Uday and Qusay took control? Or alternately, the corrupt bureaucracy of the U.N.?

The U.N. inspectors were well on their way to proving nothing, with Saddam in control of their every move. There is no proof that he destroyed any weapons at their behest either. We only discovered the real state of affairs after toppling Saddam, taking control of the whole country and having unlimited access. I'm not convinced that he was a "paper tiger" in any case. According to Douglas Hanson, Chief of Staff of the Ministry of Science and Technology (one of several ministries of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad), the Iraqi Survey Group headed by Dr. Kay was so underfunded, unfocused, uncoordinated, and lacking in security that stockpiles of weapons "may be literally right under the feet of coalition forces."

Mr. Carrier also sees "no causal connection between our invasion of Iraq and, e.g. the lack (to date) of attacks on U.S. targets." I would agree that our presence in Iraq has not been the main cause of this lack, though there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence of a connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Proof of anything in the shadowy world of terrorists is hard to come by. Of greater impact is our presence in Afghanistan, the toppling of the Taliban, the cutting off of their funding, the destruction of their training camps, and the capture or death of most of Al Qaeda's leadership. We've proven to them sufficiently that this administration, unlike the previous one, will fight back. They can't challenge us on a level playing field militarily and they know it. Therefore Al Qaeda has turned to softer targets, targets like Spain and Italy that will appease and submit, and not fight back.

Toppling Saddam however, is of great strategic value in many other ways. He openly supported Palestinian terrorists, sending large amounts of money for the families of suicide bombers. He sheltered and trained other known terrorists. He was an ongoing threat to Saudi Arabia, and like it or not, most of the world depends on Saudi oil. Neither we nor they could afford to let Saddam control those reserves, it would absolutely decimate the world's economy. There is also a large psychological component to be reckoned with. As the only Arab leader to openly defy the United States, however unsuccessfully, he was a hero and champion to many.

Mr. Carrier concludes with the question "Why did we not employ with Iraq the policies that we are now pursuing with North Korea, Syria, and Iran?" If I may say so, Mr. Carrier reminds me of the proverbial man whose only tool is a hammer, and therefore sees every problem as a nail. Every battle requires different tactics on different fronts, both military and diplomatic. In the case of Syria, because we toppled Saddam, they now recognize negotiation as being in their best interest. There was little realistic chance that they would have negotiated beforehand. Iran and North Korea both have very advanced nuclear programs and we cannot disregard the likelihood that they may already have usable weapons. Knowing how unreliable intelligence from those countries is, and how frequently we have (drastically) underestimated each country's nuclear progress, a military response is inappropriate. But to absolutely prevent Saddam from getting similar weapons? Certainly. That and what we have subsequently learned about nuclear proliferation are worth everything that this war has cost and more. Is Mr. Carrier honestly willing to trust his life and that of his family to the self-restraint and sanity of a Saddam Hussein?

jan

(Sorry this is so long, but as someone else once said, I didn't have time to make it shorter!)

Your story about your dog Ginger [see here] almost made me cry. I too had a Ginger. The sweetest, most beautiful Irish setter you'd ever want to meet. So gentle that even my grandmother would pet her. (My grandmother was attacked by a dog when she was 4 years old, and was so terrified of dogs and other animals that she had never once touched an animal of any description in the subsequent 70+ years. To this day even, my Ginger is the only animal she's ever touched.) Anyway, I noticed Ginger limping one day and took her to the vet. It was determined that she had a tumor in her abdomen that was pressing up on her spine at the base of her tail and cutting off the nerve connections to that leg. As the muscles atrophied they rotated her hip further up, lifting the foot. It didn't take long before they were pulling the joint further than it could go, causing her quite a bit of pain. She told me one morning that it was time for her to go, so I took her in and had her put to sleep. It was 11 days from when I noticed the limp, she was 9 years old. I'm so teared up right now that I can hardly see the screen. It was over a year before I could take a walk without feeling that she was missing, or come home from work and not listen for her tags as she ran to the door to greet me. Fourteen years later and I still miss that dog. The best of friends never leave our hearts.

jan

I received this letter from a reader:

Professor Burgess-Jackson,

I am fairly good at debating (not to toot my own horn) and I am a fairly strong advocate of laissez-faire capitalism, and as such I occasionally get called "dogmatic." I, in fact, try to avoid being dogmatic by explaining the logic behind my thinking, providing outside links, not using personal attacks, etc. It just so happens that I usually present a strong argument. I suspect that, even though dogma does exist, it's a charge often used as a discrediting tactic by those who disagree, but have no solid argument.

I saw on your blog that recently, someone had sent you a post from another blog that called you "dogmatic" and I was wondering, what are your thoughts on this? And how does one deal with these claims? (I usually try to turn the claims back on the person, while disassembling their claims of dogma.)

Thanks,
Dave Peterson

Thanks for writing, Dave. Here is the Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed.:

dogma

1. That which is held as an opinion; a belief, principle, tenet; esp. a tenet or doctrine authoritatively laid down by a particular church, sect, or school of thought; sometimes, depreciatingly, an imperious or arrogant declaration of opinion.

2. The body of opinion formulated or authoritatively stated; systematized belief; tenets or principles collectively; doctrinal system.

Here is Simon Blackburn:

dogma In general, a belief held unquestioningly and with undefended certainty. In the Christian Church, a belief communicated by divine revelation, and defined by the Church. (Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996], 109)

Here is Robert M. Martin:

dogma A particular belief or system of beliefs proclaimed by authority (especially religious authority) to be true. Thus, this word has also come to mean anything someone believes merely on authority, without reason, especially when stated arrogantly and intolerantly. (Robert M. Martin, The Philosopher's Dictionary, 3d ed. [Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002], 95)

There appear to be two meanings, the primary one having to do with the grounds of belief and the secondary or derivative one having to do with the attitude with which belief is expressed. A belief that is grounded only in authority (or that lacks grounds altogether) is said to be a dogma. In some contexts, such as religion, this is (or may be) acceptable. In other contexts, such as science and philosophy, authority is an unacceptable ground of belief. One is expected to (be able to) adduce other grounds besides authority for one's beliefs.

Let us call a person whose beliefs are dogmas in this primary sense a dogmatist, and his or her doctrine dogmatism. Dogmatists tend to express their beliefs dogmatically, i.e., with a certain arrogance and intolerance. The characteristic attitude of a dogmatist, in other words, is arrogant intolerance (or intolerant arrogance). But someone can express beliefs arrogantly and intolerantly without being a dogmatist. For example, suppose a scientist has—as scientists are supposed to have—revisable, tentative beliefs about some matter, but that he or she expresses these beliefs arrogantly and intolerantly, as by saying, "I've proved theory T." (Scientists don't prove anything. They formulate and test hypotheses. The most they should say, therefore, is that a given hypothesis [or theory] has not [yet] been refuted, or that hypothesis H1 is superior to its rivals, H2 and H3, by the prevailing criteria. The hallmark of science is revisability. Its characteristic attitude—and mode of expression—is modesty.) We should say that the beliefs of the hypothesized scientist are expressed dogmatically but not held dogmatically. The scientist should dial it down.

I think this is what gets me in trouble. I have reasons for all (most? many?) of my beliefs, which makes me nondogmatic, but I have a tendency to state my beliefs arrogantly and intolerantly, as if they're unrevisable and indubitable. Sometimes I do this to draw out my interlocutor. Sometimes it's just feistiness. (I love to argue.) Sometimes it's pure affect. But it often elicits the label "dogmatist." I know my beliefs have grounds other than authority, so I don't let the label for my manner of expression bother me. Philosophers have thick skins. Hell, we show affection for each other by criticizing!

Dallas (twenty-five miles from my Fort Worth house) is the home of America's Team, the Cowboys. (Actually, the team plays in Irving, a suburb of Dallas.) How is "Cowboys" pronounced? In Texas, I hear it pronounced with an "a" sound. Compare "California" and "Colorado." Say "Colorado" a few times and then "Cowboys." That's how the word is pronounced in Michigan, where I grew up. Now say "California" a few times and then "Cowboys." That's how I hear it in Texas. Not always, of course, but often. Y'all come back now, ya hear?

To the Editor:

Your April 1 front-page photo of the burned bodies of Americans hanging from the bridge in Falluja, Iraq, is nerve-shattering. The crowds cheering and dragging other American bodies through the streets add to the gut-wrenching reaction.

What in the world does it take to get us to view these cheering mobs as the enemy? Why isn't our military taking them out?

This failure to take such an action is the major difference in why we won in Germany and Japan and lost in Vietnam.

We are at war, not engaging in some type of politically correct game. Let's get on with it!

JEROME F. MCANDREWS
Claremore, Okla., April 1, 2004

I wish to add my thanks to Matthew's for Keith's allowing discussion to continue concerning the justification for the Iraq war. At the risk of overstaying my welcome, I should like to respond to Matthew's 4/2 post. I'll try to be brief.

What alternatives besides sanctions or war were there? My answer is that international diplomatic pressure, especially in concert with other Arab states should have been tried. We're doing it with North Korea, with China as a go-between. Matthew seems to think that there had to be immediate regime change, but there is no evidence that the Baathists had anything to do with international terror. Saddam was a ruthless dictator, but he wasn't threatening us or our allies. Eventually, he would have fallen, perhaps earlier rather than later if tried and convicted in absentia by an international court. The U.N. inspectors were well on their way to showing Saddam up for being a paper tiger.

He also says that "there is no possible way that we could have accurately predicted the full consequences of the war." I agree. But that's all the more reason for not initiating a war. What we could and should have predicted, though, is that we would be met with fierce guerrilla resistance, not with flowers and kisses.

Matthew says that, had I not ignored the multitude of ends to be considered, I would have found the means proportional. But all the ends he mentions are really "ends-in-view," not actual consequences nor even rationally predictable consequences. In waging war one must also consider the likelihood of achieving these goals, and what the additional consequences would be. This wasn't done by the Bush administration. They expected a "cakewalk."

I don't deny that, after a war begins, the U.S. goes out of its way to limit civilian casualties. The question, though, was whether it was justified to initiate the war. Why even begin that "ugly business" when the inspectors were on the ground and actually getting Iraq to destroy their conventional missiles?

Matthew mentions other happenings that have made us safer. I fear that, except for the removal of the Baathist regime (which was at odds with al-Qaida), this is a case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. I see no causal connection between our invasion of Iraq and, e.g. the lack (to date) of attacks on U.S. targets. I also wish it were true that anti-American rhetoric is simply rhetoric. The recent barbarism in Fallujah, however, goes counter to that.

My question to Matthew is this: Why did we not employ with Iraq the policies that we are now pursuing with North Korea, Syria, and Iran?

Len Carrier

Irreligion, n. The principal one of the great faiths of the world.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

I hope you plan to read Bill's Comments with me on a regular basis. Bill has just posted a short autobiography (literally, self life writing), which you may find interesting. I love reading biographies, auto or otherwise, long or short. They remind me that while human beings have much in common, they have many differences. Vive la difference!

William L. Rowe of Purdue University is one of my favorite philosophers. Everything I've ever read by him (see here, for example) is carefully reasoned and beautifully written. As if this weren't enough, he's one of the fairest philosophers I know, and fairness means a great deal to me. Let me give an example. Suppose Rowe disagrees with person P about a particular matter, but thinks P is being unfairly criticized by Q, with whom Rowe agrees. Rowe will defend P from Q's unfair attack. Many people, even philosophers, find this difficult to do, but not Rowe. He'd rather be fair and wrong than unfair and right, although obviously he wants to be both fair and right.

In 1979—a quarter of a century ago—Rowe published "The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism" in the American Philosophical Quarterly, which is one of the top periodicals in our discipline. I use the essay in my philosophical-writing seminar as a model. I lecture on it in my Philosophy of Religion courses every other year. I've discussed it in print (in a review of Richard Swinburne's book Is There a God? [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996]). Every time I read the essay, I learn something, something that escaped my attention on previous readings. It is a treasure trove of ideas, distinctions, arguments, and techniques. Here is the second paragraph of the essay, which will show you how careful a writer Rowe is:

Before we consider the argument from evil, we need to distinguish a narrow and a broad sense of the terms "theist," "atheist," and "agnostic." By a "theist" in the narrow sense I mean someone who believes in the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, supremely good being who created the world. By a "theist" in the broad sense I mean someone who believes in the existence of some sort of divine being or divine reality. To be a theist in the narrow sense is also to be a theist in the broad sense, but one may be a theist in the broad sense—as was Paul Tillich—without believing that there is a supremely good, omnipotent, omniscient, eternal being who created the world. Similar distinctions must be made between a narrow and a broad sense of the terms "atheist" and "agnostic." To be an atheist in the broad sense is to deny the existence of any sort of divine being or divine reality. Tillich was not an atheist in the broad sense. But he was an atheist in the narrow sense, for he denied that there exists a divine being that is all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good. In this paper I will be using the terms "theism," "theist," "atheism," "atheist," "agnosticism," and "agnostic" in the narrow sense, not in the broad sense. (William L. Rowe, "The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism," American Philosophical Quarterly 16 [October 1979]: 335-41, at 335)

All of the following propositions are implied by Rowe's definitions:

1. All narrow theists are broad theists.

2. Not all broad theists are narrow theists. In other words, one can be a broad theist without being a narrow theist. Indeed, one can be a broad theist while being a narrow atheist (or agnostic)!

3. All broad atheists are narrow atheists.

4. Not all narrow atheists are broad atheists. In other words, one can be a narrow atheist without being a broad atheist.

5. All broad agnostics are narrow agnostics.

6. Not all narrow agnostics are broad agnostics. In other words, one can be a narrow agnostic without being a broad agnostic.

You might wonder about the significance of this. What problems does Rowe's distinction help us solve? What it does is what any classification, scientific or philosophical, does. It sorts things (in this case people) out. Rowe and I, for example, are broad atheists (and therefore narrow atheists). Richard Swinburne is a narrow theist (and therefore a broad theist). Paul Tillich is a broad theist but a narrow atheist. David Hume, in my judgment, is a broad agnostic (and therefore a narrow agnostic). Rowe and I have something in common with Tillich (viz., narrow atheism) but also an important difference. Swinburne and Tillich have something in common (viz., broad theism) but also an important difference. Rowe and I have nothing in common with Swinburne (at least with respect to theism).

There are always many ways to classify a collection of objects. No classification scheme (taxonomy, typology) is true (or false); they are only more or less useful for our theoretical or practical purposes. For example, I can divide the class of things (a numerically large class!) into (1) those that are both red-haired and left-handed and (2) those that are not both red-haired and left-handed (i.e., those that are either not red-haired or not left-handed or both). These categories are mutually exclusive (meaning no object goes in both categories) and jointly exhaustive (meaning every object goes in at least one category), which is a desideratum of any classification scheme, but are they useful? Are they fecund, in the sense of suggesting testable hypotheses? Probably not. But that doesn't mean the classification scheme is false. It's just useless.

Rowe's distinction between broad and narrow theism has many theoretical and practical uses. If nothing else, it dispels confusion by sharpening our terminology. Rowe, for example, wants it to be clear how he uses the terms "theist," "atheist," and "agnostic." To a philosopher, getting clear about things is an end in itself, not a mere means to some further end. The philosopher's job, as mundane and uninspiring as it may sound to the uninitiated, is to sort things out. The philosopher is a conceptual cartographer, a mapper of logical space. What people choose to do in that space, with that map, is up to them.

Many of you know that I'm a dog person. (See my essay "Doing Right by Our Animal Companions," a link to which appears on the left side of this blog.) My beloved Sophie is eleven years old. We've been together for all but the first two months of her life. I call her my "old pup." She's my best friend. A few months after bringing Sophie home from the breeder's kennel, I brought Ginger home from the Fort Worth Humane Society. The next seven years were, in a word, wonderful. The girls (as I call them) and I rambled thousands of miles through the neighboring woods. We had many adventures and more than a few close calls (floods, rampaging cows, hail, skunks, snakes, &c). On Thanksgiving Day 2000, to my horror and everlasting grief, Ginger died. She had appeared perfectly healthy until three weeks before, when she became lethargic. Then, over a period of about a week, she had (at least) two seizures, which frightened me greatly. She spent time in a hospital. It turns out she had a lung tumor that had spread to her brain. There was nothing anyone could do. I would have given any amount of money to save her life.

Sophie and I soldiered on, heartbroken, for almost three years. Finally, this past July, it was time to bring some sunshine into our lives. I went to the Humane Society to rescue another dog. There in a cage, on my second trip into the visiting room, was the cutest little girl you've ever seen. She seemed tired, but she walked up to me to say hello. That did it. I had her home in an hour. The card said that Shelbie was three and a half months old, so I gave her a birthdate of 2 April. That means Shelbie is one year old today. Happy birthday, stinker! A few minutes ago I took several pictures in the back yard, after our morning walk. I'll post one in a couple of days.

Shelbie is everything I hoped for and more. She's smart, pretty, affectionate, active, and playful. She reminds me very much of Ginger. Don't say that all dogs are alike. They're as different as people. Sophie, for example, has a different personality from either Ginger or Shelbie. Puppies are susceptible to various diseases, but Shelbie is probably through the riskiest part of her life. She's happy and healthy. She loves everyone (including the mail carrier) and everything (including the arms of the sofa, which are chewed to shreds). She keeps Sophie and the Big Ape on their toes, and goodness knows they need it. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) said that he would not want to live in a world without dogs. I concur. Pun absolutely intended.

Cur 1. A dog: now always depreciative or contemptuous; a worthless, low-bred, or snappish dog. Formerly (and still sometimes dialectally) applied without depreciation, esp. to a watch-dog or shepherd's dog. (Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed.)

Has anyone tried to send me e-mail and gotten a Mailblocks challenge? Several months ago, I paid ten dollars for a one-year subscription to Mailblocks, which claims to be a spam-prevention tool. I couldn't get it to work. The instructions made no sense to me. (They were too technical.) Finally, in frustration, I gave up and uninstalled the software (or rather, deleted the Mailblocks stuff from my Outlook Express e-mail accounts).

Fast forward to yesterday. One of my readers, Jan, said something about having to use Mailblocks to get through to me. I was astonished. A few minutes ago, I went to Mailblocks and found that I had over 500 e-mails stored there. It appeared as though all of them had gotten through to me via my EarthLink account, so I deleted them.

I have so many questions I don't know where to begin. First, if Mailblocks has been working all this time, why have I been receiving spam? I don't get a lot of it, but I get some. Why should I get any? Second, assuming that not everyone who sends e-mail to me has had to respond to a challenge, why are only some people (such as Jan) having to do this? Third, why is e-mail being stored by Mailblocks? It's supposed to be forwarded to me. (In other words, why is it both stored and forwarded?)

There appears to be no way for me to terminate my account, so I wrote to Mailblocks asking to have the account disabled. I want nothing to do with such an incompetent company. Please don't waste your money on it. Oh, by the way, did I mention that I never got a response to my e-mails, except one saying that my ten dollars couldn't be refunded? Some company. It's a rip-off.

In case you're wondering, here's what I expected to get for my ten dollars. I expected all of the mail sent to my UTA and EarthLink addresses to be filtered through Mailblocks. When someone sends e-mail to either of those addresses, he or she must respond to a challenge. This keeps spam out. I would get only mail from real people who are willing to take a few seconds (one time) to respond to a challenge. That's it! I don't ever want to see the word "Mailblocks" or have to go to the Mailblocks site. I want Mailblocks to be invisible. It sounds so simple, and yet five college degrees couldn't help me figure it out. Is it me, or is it Mailblocks?

I want to thank Dr. Carrier for taking the time to engage in this dialogue and for his thoughtful responses [see here]. I'd also like to thank Keith for being such a generous host.

I'm glad that I could clear up the issue surrounding the international tribunal needed for assessing the crimes of Saddam and his government. I'll grant that the wheels of justice do turn slowly but grind exceedingly fine, especially when you have the accused in custody. I point out that such procedures are costly and time-consuming because they would serve little or no purpose when the accused is not in custody. Odds of Saddam leaving Iraq like Pinochet left Chile: -1. Odds of Saddam cementing power in Iraq, while the West holds a mock trial: 100%. What would be the punishment of such a trial in absentia, a letter of condemnation, a warrant for arrest, or punitive damages? I fail to see what such a trial would accomplish in any practical sense.

I don't see that you answered my question one. You responded that, "I disagree that we knew enough to reasonably expect anything more than we got." That is not an answer to what a plausible alternative would have looked like, is it? Nor does it seem to answer how you would measure the difference between the real outcome, which is yet to be seen, and your plausible outcome. At this point I'd say that the full consequences are yet to be known, and there is no possible way we could have accurately predicted the full consequences of the war.

In response to question two on proportionality, you give a mixed response employing both jus in bello and jus ad bellum concerns. Jus ad bellum concerns of proportionality address whether the desired end is proportional to the means used. I think that when considering the jus ad bellum notion of proportionality you ignore the multitude of ends that are to be considered; including but not limited to an end to the ongoing Iraq-US conflict following Gulf War I, an end to the sanctions regime, an end of a state known to sponsor terrorism, liberation of the Iraqi people, removal of a brutal dictator, etc. The means employed to achieve these aims were well within accepted and conceivable limits of proportionality.

To address your jus in bello concerns over proportionality, concerns that seek to limit the extent of destruction and casualties by soldiers, I would point out that no other government goes to the extent that the US does to protect noncombatants. Even if we were to accept the worst estimates of a partisan group like Iraq Body Count, the numbers range from 8,799-10,649, which pales in comparison to estimated 400,000 children killed by the sanctions regime. It is not clear under what circumstances these people were killed, obviously some died due to bombing by the US, but I'm left to wonder how many were actual civilians and were they near military targets. That said there is good reason to reject the IBC numbers, which is clear if you look at their methodology. Only 692 civilians have actually been identified according to the IBC. Unfortunately, jus in bello proportionality suffers from lacking a real metric to measure the number of casualties that are acceptable. Obviously any civilian casualties are bad, but it would be naive to think a war could be fought without casualties. Bombs go astray and people make mistakes. War is an ugly business, but I think that when it comes to jus in bello concerns over proportionality and discrimination, US troops are as good as you could reasonably expect.

The evidence contrary to your three is that we have captured a number of top al-Qaeda operatives, removed the Baathist regime in Iraq, seen Libya start to return to the civilized world, enlisted Pakistan to actually combat terrorism (along with a number of other states), seen stronger democratic attempts in Iran, and movement on the issue of Iranian nukes. I could go on and point out the lack of attacks on unprotected US targets like embassies, the USS Cole, Twin Towers, etc. Let me also say that anti-American rhetoric is simply that, rhetoric. Based on that kind of argument we can expect to see French, Spanish, and German terrorists any day.

I mention the sanctions because it seems to be the only alternative to either leaving Saddam and company free to go, or the present war. I'm curious as to what other alternatives you thought existed. Most people who disagreed with the war urged continued containment, or complete withdrawal. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on other real alternatives.

Matthew

P.S. Keith, if this is taking up to much of your blog, I'd be open to moving the discussion to email.

As a conservative, I accord a presumption to tradition (the way liberals accord a presumption to individual liberty). But presumptions, by their nature, are rebuttable. Here is a tradition the presumption in favor of which is rebutted.

Philosophy, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

(Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, c. 1911)

Philosophy, n. A route of many roads leading from everywhere to everything.

(AnalPhilosopher)

I've met a lot of interesting and pleasant people in the blogosphere. One of them is Bill Keezer. Bill started a blog today, Bill's Comments. I plan to visit it regularly to partake of Bill's wisdom. I hope you do, too. Welcome to the blogosphere, Bill! Please put up a site counter so we can watch your progress.

Clothing is a part of our difficult, post-Edenic lives; and dress, stationed at a boundary between self and other, marking a distinction between private and public, individual and social, is likely to be vexed by the forces of border wars. Philosophers, those who believe that the life worth living is the examined life, should find that willful ignorance of these matters ill suits them. Could something else be disturbing their thought of fashion?

Philosophers define themselves as the lovers of wisdom, not the beloved. They are the cognizers, and their purest professional aim is to know, not to be known, to think, not to be thought about. A personal interest in dress and open responsiveness to the changing whims of fashion depend upon a recognition that one is seen, that one is—among other things—an object of others' sight, others' cognition. The activity of philosophy may engender a deep antipathy to the acknowledgement of personal passivity, an acknowledgement required for this recognition. And yet we humans are seen—no one is really just a seer. There is a passive phase in the human being, and philosophy is wrong to deny or to berate it.

(Karen Hanson, "Dressing Down Dressing Up—The Philosophic Fear of Fashion," Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 5 [summer 1990]: 107-21, at 119 [italics in original; endnotes omitted])

To the Editor:

"Reason to Run? Nader Argues He Has Plenty" (front page, March 31) continues your tradition of underestimating the breadth of Ralph Nader's appeal.

True conservatives know that Mr. Nader has been as much an opponent of big government as he has been of big corporations, and they are as dismayed as he at the Patriot Act, the Bush deficits and the loss of American sovereignty to international corporate power under the World Trade Organization.

While you are dismissive of Mr. Nader's claims to right-wing support, national polls that were released this week by USA Today/CNN/Gallup and by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press both show Mr. Nader drawing support equally from President Bush and John Kerry.

Further, many on the left see supporting Mr. Nader at this stage as necessary to keep Mr. Kerry from caving in to corporate power.

These voters may be available to Mr. Kerry in the fall, whereas conservatives who see Mr. Bush as crushing individual liberties while selling out America to international corporations are unlikely to see much between now and November to change their minds.

GREGORY KAFOURY
Portland, Ore., March 31, 2004
The writer was a chief organizer of the Nader Super Rallies in 2000.

The other day, a former student sent a link to this site. I scrolled through the images, reading the text as I went, and put up a link. It didn't affect me at the time, but it's been haunting me ever since. I had heard of Chernobyl, of course, but never seen images of the region or given much thought to the people who were killed or displaced. The images bring home the human tragedy. I can't get it out of my mind. I think the young woman's bravery has gotten to me, too. Her prose is both matter-of-fact and sensitive, or rather, her sensitivity comes through in spite of her attempt to be matter-of-fact about what she describes. Has anyone else had a delayed, melancholy reaction to this site?

I welcome Matthew's two posts of 3/31 criticizing my reasons against our invading Iraq. I wish to thank him for curing my ignorance concerning the specific international tribunal needed for assessing the crimes of Saddam and his government. I presently hope to return the favor with regard to the other observations that he made. But first, by all means, let justice be served by those bi-lateral agreements that allowed Milosovic to be tried. Matthew complains that such procedures are costly and time-consuming. Yes, but so has been our invasion of Iraq; and the wheels of justice, as Matthew should well know, turn slowly but grind exceedingly fine.

As for the four points he raises in his first post, I have already answered them in what he refers to as "Carrier's new four" in his second post. I should only add that, with regard to point (3), we are not safer for having invaded Iraq because we have wasted hundreds of American lives and billions of dollars that could and should have been used to root out and destroy the al-Qaida terrorists. Instead we have created even more zealots who hate us.

With regard to Matthew's second posting, he points out that the sanctions were failing. Did I say that I supported the sanctions? I did not. They resulted in the deaths of perhaps 400,000 children. My point is simply that it is not rational to replace one failing strategy with another. To think that we can impose democracy by force of arms—especially in the Middle East—is really to bury one's head in the sand.

Finally, he asks for my take on Safire's column on "Kofigate." Well, there's just no limit to human greed. Just ask Halliburton, Brown & Root, and Ariel Sharon. As others reap benefits, the people of Iraq have been made to suffer mightily for living in a land of vast oil reserves and sharp ethnic divisions.

L. S. Carrier