AnalPhilosopher

Two days ago, I did my sixth bike rally of the year—in Pilot Point. I rode 44.6 miles in windy, overcast conditions with my friend Butch Moldenhauer, who pulled his two-year old son Lance in a Burley trailer. I could see Lance as we rode. He slept a lot, but when he was awake he seemed to be enjoying the ride. We saw a train (in fact, we had to stop for it); we stopped at a rest stop about halfway through so he could stretch his legs; and when we got back, we took pictures in front of the emergency helicopter. I was tickled that Lance walked with me, holding my index finger in his little hand. He seems to like me, or at least to put up with me. Here is Lance (named after Lance Armstrong) and Uncle Keith.

Gossage:

Received your latest letter today, and while it was just shy of coherence, I think I can see where your bewilderment lies. From your enclosed diagram, it has become apparent to me that for the past six weeks we have been playing two completely different chess games—myself according to our correspondence, you more in keeping with the world as you would have it, rather than with any rational system of order. The knight move which allegedly got lost in the mail would have been impossible on the twenty-second move, as the piece was then standing on the edge of the last file, and the move you describe would have brought it to rest on the coffee table, next to the board.

As for granting you two consecutive moves to make up for one allegedly lost in the mail—surely you jest, Pops. I will honor your first move (you may take my bishop), but I cannot allow the second, and as it is now my turn, I retaliate by removing your queen with my rook. The fact that you tell me I have no rooks means little in actuality, as I need only glance downward at the board to see them darting about with cunning and vigor.

Finally, that diagram of what you fantasize the board to look like indicates a freewheeling, Marx Brothers approach to the game, and, while amusing, this hardly speaks well for your assimilation of Nimzowitsch on Chess, which you hustled from the library under your alpaca sweater last winter, because I saw you. I suggest you study the diagram I enclose and rearrange your board accordingly, that we might finish up with some degree of precision.

Hopefully,
Vardebedian

Rum, n. Generically, fiery liquors that produce madness in total abstainers.

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

Two comments and a rant. First, I said the other day that I would no longer post names or other identifying information in the letters I publish. If you see a name from now on, it's because the correspondent requested it. Some people are more than happy to have their names published with their letters. I want to accommodate them.

Second, I've begun posting the favorable letters about my Tech Central Station column "Explaining Liberal Anger." I was going to dump all of them into a Word document, clean it up, upload it, and post a link to it—so everyone could read all the wonderful letters I received. But I've decided to post the letters (or some of them) in this blog instead. I'll post one letter a day until I'm caught up. I think you'll agree that the letters are interesting, poignant, and uplifting. My column obviously touched a nerve.

Permit me a rant this fine afternoon, Memorial Day holiday notwithstanding. Is it just me, or are conservatives nicer people than liberals? Liberals strike me as profoundly unhappy, perhaps because (1) they have killed off God, belief in whom consoles people, and (2) they can't persuade their fellow Americans to embrace their redistributive, responsibility-denying, merit-ignoring agenda. This unhappiness makes them restless, frustrated, resentful, ornery, angry, paranoid, hateful, cynical, and mean. Not necessarily in that order.

To my liberal friends: Lighten up! You have only one life to live. That's right: one. The one you have. The one that's underway. If you spend it with a chip on your shoulder, seeing only the bad about our world and not the good, comparing what is to what should be (by your lights) rather than to what could be, you will have wasted all you have; and if you have children, you will have taught them a terrible lesson.

Kim du Toit has a nice memorial to a warrior here. I'm not sure whether du Toit is the author of the piece, so I'm not sure whether the man being discussed is his own grandfather. In any event, it's a nice tribute.

Hello Keith,

This is an outstanding article! Really opened my eyes as to what liberals think. I've e-mailed your article to several conservative friends . . . each one called back to discuss it. They all loved it. Each also wondered what finally caused the scales to fall from your eyes, and leave the dark side. Welcome home, we're proud to have you on our side.

I'll eagerly watch for more of your articles.

To the Editor:

I live in Arkansas, a very beautiful, historic and rural state. I don't think that we have many covered bridges, though.

But we do have more than 85 Wal-Mart stores, yet we are greener than green, a beautiful state with camping and hiking, fishing and hunting, canoeing and white-water rafting.

Yet there is no "legion of yellow smiley faces," and our citizens aren't denied the opportunity of buying $10 jeans at one of those Wal-Marts. While Vermont may have some rich refugees from Boston and New York with their stock portfolios, their knitting and The New York Times, we in Arkansas do not.

Surely you feign in oozing concern for poor Vermont. Come off it, you guys; that air is awfully thin up there where you look down on the rest of us west of the Hudson and write stuff like "An Endangered State" (editorial, May 26). Give me a break!

THOMAS E. WILLIAMS
Rogers, Ark., May 27, 2004

Egalitarian liberals are liberals who believe that liberalism—against its classical formulations—carries within itself coercively backed guarantees against inequalities. . . . The liberal commitment to equal freedom, on its modern reformulation, requires not only equality of status. This commitment also allows, indeed requires, that the liberal state act to rectify inequalities in the worth of people's liberties—at least where those inequalities become great enough to threaten people's status as political equals. The worth of people's liberties is now understood to be connected in important ways to those people's ability to command resources. The main thrust of the liberal research agenda for the past thirty years has been to demonstrate that a response to concerns about inequalities in the worth of liberties can be built into liberal theory at the level of justice. In addition to mandating equality of status between citizens, liberal theory is now said to generate far more ambitious principles. These principles require that the state seek to rectify an ever expanding array of inequalities in people's actual life prospects, especially inequalities that result from unchosen circumstances such as differences in people's natural talents or their social starting places. John Rawls's famous "difference principle," which sees liberal justice as requiring that social inequalities be arranged so as to benefit the least well-off members of society—is a paradigm expression of this feature of egalitarian liberalism.

(John Tomasi, "Should Political Liberals Be Compassionate Conservatives? Philosophical Foundations of the Faith-Based Initiative," Social Philosophy & Policy 21 [winter 2004]: 322-45, at 341 [italics in original; footnote omitted])

John Ray has been having a set-to with the pugnacious, impertinent boys at onegoodmove. See here. By the way, boys, it's "buck-naked," not "butt-naked." (See here.) This is a mistake only a nonreader could make.

I have some admissions to make. I am not the best guitarist. I am not the best cook. (I may be the worst.) I am not the best philosopher. I am not the best bicyclist. I am not the best lover. But by god, I'm the best driver. I say that on a day in which I watched the Indianapolis 500 automobile race. Those drivers have nothing on me.

But seriously, I'm a conscientious driver. I learned well from Walt Purogroski of Vassar High School in the early 1970s. He would never have guessed that I, who didn't know the brake from the accelerator the first time I slid into the driver's seat, would turn out to be his prize pupil, the best driver he ever produced, a legend in his own mind.

But seriously, driving ability is scandalously, shockingly poor. I am constantly amazed and disturbed, while on the road, by what others do (or fail to do). Here is one peeve of many I could write about this fine evening.

When you're entering a highway (we in the United States call them "freeways"), the burden is on you to blend in. You. Not others. Yesterday, while driving to Pilot Point for my bike rally, I was traveling in the right lane of Interstate 35W, having a good old time, when a driver came alongside from the entrance ramp. Now, if nobody is to my left when this happens, I move over to give the entering driver room. It's simple courtesy.

But yesterday there were vehicles to my left, so I couldn't move. There we are, side by side, traveling at sixty miles per hour, and the other driver's road is about to run out. It's the entering driver's responsibility in this situation either to accelerate or to decelerate, either to get ahead of me or to nestle in behind me. It's not my responsibility to do either of these things. In fact, I should scrupulously maintain my speed; otherwise, we play Abbott and Costello with each other and someone (preferably you) gets killed.

Got it? It's really very simple. If you're not on the highway, you have to work, plead, and cajole to get on it. Think of there being a presumption against your being on the highway. It's a presumption you will have to rebut. You should not expect others to accommodate you, just because you're you or because you have a fancy, expensive vehicle. If they do, fine; but they don't have to. In philosophical terminology, it's supererogatory, not obligatory.

I'm pleased to report that Dr Ray has indeed published on national character. See here (1972) and here (1982). Thanks, John! I'd still like to see your reflections on my post of this morning, if you can find the time. No hurry.

The simplistic observation that men and women have different average earnings is misleading. As economist Jennifer Roback has noted, '[o]nce we observe that people sacrifice money income for other pleasurable things we can infer next to nothing by comparing the income of one person with another.' However, the fact that earnings are easier to quantify than other job attributes leads to an undue focus on compensation disparities. If women make the same kinds of human-capital investments and occupational choices as men, their compensation will be similar to men's. If women choose to work fewer hours, seek less job-related training, and select jobs with advantages that for them outweigh the lower pay, they will earn less.

(Kingsley Browne, Divided Labours: An Evolutionary View of Women at Work, Darwinism Today, ed. Helena Cronin and Oliver Curry [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999 (1998)], 51 [quoting Jennifer Roback, "Beyond Equality," Georgetown Law Journal 82 (1993): 121-33])

Vardebedian:

I have just finished perusing your latest note, the one containing a bizarre forty-sixth move dealing with the removal of my queen from a square on which it has not rested for eleven days. Through patient calculation, I think I have hit upon the cause of your confusion and misunderstanding of the existing facts. That your rook rests on the king's fourth square is an impossibility commensurate with two like snowflakes; if you will refer back to the ninth move of the game, you will see clearly that your rook has long been captured. Indeed, it was that same daring sacrificial combination that ripped your center and cost you both your rooks. What are they doing on the board now?

I offer for your consideration that what happened is as follows: The intensity of foray and whirlwind exchanges on and about the twenty-second move left you in a state of slight dissociation, and in your anxiety to hold your own at that point you failed to notice that my usual letter was not forthcoming but instead moved your own pieces twice, giving you a somewhat unfair advantage, wouldn't you say? This is over and done with, and to retrace our steps tediously would be difficult, if not impossible. Therefore, I feel the best way to rectify this entire matter is to allow me the opportunity of two consecutive moves at this time. Fair is fair.

First, then, I take your bishop with my pawn. Then, as this leaves your queen unprotected, I capture her also. I think we can now proceed with the last stages unhampered.

Sincerely,
Gossage

P.S.: I am enclosing a diagram showing exactly how the board looks, for your edification in your closing play. As you can see, your king is trapped, unguarded and alone in the center. Best to you.

G.

To the Editor:

Your editorial admonishing the Catholic bishops to be careful about crossing the line between church and state ("Hustings and Pulpits," May 24) might have carried greater clout if The Times had not been on record commending Archbishop Joseph Rummel of New Orleans in 1962 for excommunicating several pro-segregation Catholic politicians.

Your editorial also mentions that the 48 Democrats who signed a letter protesting sanctions against abortion-rights lawmakers are upset with the bishops for not targeting support for the war in Iraq and capital punishment as similarly unacceptable. But the church teaches that war and capital punishment, though never desirable, are sometimes necessary; unlike abortion, they are not intrinsically evil.

Any discussion on separation of church and state in an election year must begin by addressing the most flagrant violation of this constitutional principle: the frequent endorsement of candidates for public office made in Protestant churches on Sunday mornings.

To chide Catholic bishops for exercising their free-speech rights while giving Protestant ministers a pass on endorsing candidates is unfair.

WILLIAM A. DONOHUE
President, Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights
New York, May 24, 2004

We know that individuals have character. Some people are honest, others mendacious. Some people are courageous, others cowardly. Some people are trustworthy, others unreliable. Some people are friendly, others ornery. Character is not action, but it manifests itself in action. We might say that character is a disposition to act in certain ways (but not others). Even inanimate objects have character. Glass, for instance, is disposed to break. That is its character. It has this disposition even if it never gets an "opportunity" to "act" on it, i.e., even if nothing ever strikes it. By the same token, a person can be courageous or trustworthy even if he or she never gets a chance to exhibit it.

Let's be more concrete. Honest people tell the truth. They do it naturally (spontaneously, effortlessly) and without reflection, even when it has a personal cost. This isn't to say that honest people always tell the truth, for it could be that truth-telling is sometimes wrong (as when your spouse asks, "How do I look?"). And even when it's right, an honest person may fail to tell the truth. Good people who know what morality requires of them sometimes act wrongly. When this happens, we say that they suffer from weakness of the will ("moral weakness"). They know what's right, but can't bring themselves to do it. They succumb to temptation (of the flesh or otherwise).

Do nations have character? Is there a German character, for example? An American character? An Australian or French character? An Iraqi character? If so, what does national character amount to? Surely there could be a German character even if not every German has that character, so let's not make that silly mistake. Nor is ascribing character to nations anthropomorphizing. Nations aren't human beings, obviously, but they're persons. They're moral agents. As such, they're responsible for what they do, legally and morally. Nations are corporate persons, like IBM and Microsoft.

I wish Dr John J. Ray, my polymathic friend Down Under whose academic specialty is psychology, would write something about national character in his blog. Perhaps he's written about it in a scholarly publication, in which case he can direct us to it. I'm particularly interested in the causes, functions, and consequences of national character, assuming there is such a thing. How and why does it emerge? What functions does it perform? What are its consequences?

Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that themselves are sane. For illustration, this present (and illustrious) lexicographer is no firmer in the faith of his own sanity than is any inmate of any madhouse in the land; yet for aught he knows to the contrary, instead of the lofty occupation that seems to him to be engaging his powers he may really be beating his hands against the window bars of an asylum and declaring himself Noah Webster, to the innocent delight of many thoughtless spectators.

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

Sir,

Brilliant! [See here.] Lucid and the best short recitation of the mindset of people morally superior to, and better informed than, "gravity." "If we were only allowed to be in charge," they say, "everyone would fly."

Somehow that short piece should become core class reading for incoming freshmen the world over. But that is assuming that liberals could even rationally discuss and defend the premise of their own views.

I, conversely, think that they are "ignorant, stupid, and evil." It is not the thought that is objectionable but their vs. my, unwillingness vs. willingness to appeal to an epistemology that can measure truth and righteousness.

Thanks again!

Gossage:

Received the letter this morning containing your forty-fifth move (your knight captures my queen?), and also your lengthy explanation regarding the mid-September ellipsis in our correspondence. Let me see if I understand you correctly. Your knight, which I removed from the board weeks ago, you now claim should be resting on the king's fourth square, owing to a letter lost in the mail twenty-three moves ago. I was not aware that any such mishap had occurred, and remember distinctly your making a twenty-second move, which I think was your rook to the queen's sixth square, where it was subsequently butchered in a gambit of yours that misfired tragically.

Currently, the king's fourth square is occupied by my rook, and as you are knightless, the dead-letter office notwithstanding, I cannot quite understand what piece you are using to capture my queen with. What I think you mean, as most of your pieces are blockaded, is that you request your king be moved to my bishop's fourth square (your only possibility)—an adjustment I have taken the liberty of making and then countering with today's move, my forty-sixth, wherein I capture your queen and put your king in check. Now your letter becomes clearer.

I think now the last remaining moves of the game can be played out with smoothness and alacrity.

Faithfully,
Vardebedian

Optimism, n. The doctrine, or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong. It is held with greatest tenacity by those most accustomed to the mischance of falling into adversity, and is most acceptably expounded with the grin that apes a smile. Being a blind faith, it is inaccessible to the light of disproof—an intellectual disorder, yielding to no treatment but death. It is hereditary, but fortunately not contagious.

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

I had a wonderful childhood. My parents provided me with a safe, secure world, with just the right mix of freedom and structure. I grew up in rural Michigan, about a hundred miles north of Detroit. Michigan's Lower Peninsula is shaped like a mitten. I grew up in the Thumb area (as it's called), not far from Saginaw Bay.

Between kindergarten and fifth grade, my family moved several times. This can be hard on kids, but I took it in stride. Old friends were simply replaced with new ones. Almost all of our houses were in wooded areas, with creeks and meadows nearby. Like my brother Glenn, who's two years older and a lot crankier, I came to love nature and animals.

One of my earliest memories is of our house in Metamora, where I attended kindergarten and first grade. This would be 1962 through 1964, about the time our nation lost its innocence. We lived a couple of miles from town, near a marshy meadow. (The marsh part was filled with cattails, which waved in the wind.) Although I was only five or six years old, I loved going into the meadow to "explore." (Is anyone surprised that I'm a Lewis and Clark buff?) Glenn and I made "forts" in the bushes. When we got BB guns, we hunted birds. (This is before we were moral agents, so don't blame us.)

I will never forget the sound of the red-winged blackbirds that frequented the meadow near our house. Today, while riding my bike in Pilot Point (north of Dallas-Fort Worth) with my friend Butch Moldenhauer and his two-year old son Lance, I heard many red-winged blackbirds. It's the only bird note I can identify, and it transports me instantly to Metamora four decades ago—to a time of innocence, wonder, security, and joy. Here is the Wikipedia entry on the red-winged blackbird. Here is a site that contains a sound file, which will allow you to hear the bird's distinctive (and, to my ears, lovely) note.

Keith,

Like you, I am surprised by the anger directed at Ralph Nader by many on the left. Most interesting to me are the seeming facts that establishment Democrats despise him because he criticizes them as being the same as, or insignificantly dissimilar to, establishment Republicans, while rank-and-file Democrats despise him because they believe he will take votes away from an otherwise successful Kerry run at the presidency. I find this laughable—in a sporting sort of way—because I will vote either for GWB or the Libertarian candidate (whoever that is).

But my real reason for writing is to say that John Kerry, like Al Gore in 2000, is to blame if he fails in his goal to become president, not Ralph Nader. George HW Bush (GW I if you prefer) didn't lose to Bill Clinton in '92 because of Ross Perot; he lost because he failed to provide a vision that was compelling and competitive, as compared to his opponent(s). That is why Al Gore lost and, should he lose, so will it be for John Kerry.

By the way, GWB and the Republicans make the same mistake by taking some glee in Ralph's running that could lull them into a false sense of security on the president's chances for victory in November.

I see American patriotism as including a warmth and affection for, a commitment to, a responsibility toward, a pride in, and support of the United States—its institutions, its way of life and aspirations, and its people. Love may be a summary term that covers all these things, but I think that each of these elements is discrete.

(Stanley A. Renshon, "Dual Citizenship and American Democracy: Patriotism, National Attachment, and National Identity," Social Philosophy & Policy 21 [winter 2004]: 100-20, at 115)

To the Editor:

Al Gore blasts President Bush for the way he has handled the war on terror (news article, May 27), but it seems that Mr. Gore forgets how little he and President Bill Clinton did to fight terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While both sat idly by, Al Qaeda was able to strengthen its numbers and positions in the Middle East and in the United States. Now, Mr. Gore blames President Bush for going after the terrorists, which he and President Clinton never had the courage to do.

DAVID NEUNER
Richmond, Va., May 27, 2004

Julie K. Underwood and Julie F. Mead, "Establishment of Religion Analysis: The Lemon Test or Just Lemonade?" Journal of Law and Education 25 (winter 1996): 55.

Daniel J. Beckwith, "Is Bob Marley Dead or Just Ambidextrous?" Creighton Law Review 29 (June 1996): 1477.

Christoph Rehmann-Sutter, "Frankensteinian Knowledge," The Monist 79 (April 1996): 264.

Edwin Curley, "Calvin and Hobbes, or an Orthodox Christian," Journal of the History of Philosophy 34 (April 1996): 257.

Terence D. Friedman, "Celotex Corp. v. Edwards: Go Directly to Bankruptcy Court. Do Not Pass District Court. Do Not Collect Your Judgment," Baylor Law Review 48 (spring 1996): 575.

Texans come up with colorful expressions. One of my favorites is, "All hat and no cattle." It's a beautiful way of condemning a posturer, poseur, or pretender. I would have guessed that the expression goes way back, but a quick Internet search suggests it may have been coined by former Texas governor Ann Richards. Her target? None other than our current president, who defeated Richards for the governorship of Texas in 1994. See here. (Richards is also the originator of the classic line, "George W. Bush was born with a silver foot in his mouth"—an intentionally and comically mixed metaphor.)

I'll leave it to you to decide whether President Bush is all hat and no cattle. I think it's closer to the opposite: all cattle and no hat. He's a humble, self-effacing man, with more character in his little finger than Bill Clinton, Al Gore, or John Kerry has in his entire body. (Sorry; I couldn't resist a political rant in what's supposed to be an impartial blog feature. I'm sure you're used to it by now.)

I've seen only one or two Woody Allen films and have no dramatic expertise, so I can't speak to Allen's merits as a director or as an actor. I've heard and read that he's good—on both scores. I do know that he can write, because (1) I'm a writer and (2) I've read one of his books, Getting Even (New York: Vintage Books, 1978 [first published in 1971]). The book was given to me on 14 March 1986 by Gloria Torres, an assistant city prosecutor in Tucson, Arizona, on the occasion of my retirement from the practice of law (at the tender age of twenty-eight). As I recall, Gloria liked Allen and wanted me to savor his wit. Thanks, Gloria!

My favorite chapter in the book is "The Gossage-Vardebedian Papers." It's an exchange of letters between—you guessed it—Gossage and Vardebedian. We know nothing about these characters except their names, but their personalities shine through in their correspondence, which grows increasingly sarcastic. I'm going to post one letter a day until the chapter is done. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do. Here's the first letter:

My Dear Vardebedian:

I was more than a bit chagrined today, on going through the morning's mail, to find that my letter of September 16, containing my twenty-second move (knight to the king's fourth square), was returned unopened due to a small error in addressing—precisely, the omission of your name and residence (how Freudian can one get?), coupled with a failure to append postage. That I have been disconcerted of late due to equivocation in the stock market is no secret, and though on the above-mentioned September 16 the culmination of a long-standing downward spiral dropped Amalgamated Anti-Matter off the Big Board once and for all, reducing my broker suddenly to the legume family, I do not offer this as an excuse for my negligence and monumental ineptitude. I goofed. Forgive me. That you failed to notice the missing letter indicates a certain disconcertion on your part, which I put down to zeal, but heaven knows we all make mistakes. That's life—and chess.

Well, then, the error laid bare, simple rectification follows. If you would be so good as to transfer my knight to your king's fourth square I think we may proceed with our little game more accurately. The announcement of checkmate which you made in this morning's mail is, I fear, in all fairness, a false alarm, and if you will reëxamine the positions in light of today's discovery, you will find that it is your king that lies close to mate, exposed and undefended, an immobile target for my predatory bishops. Ironic, the vicissitudes of miniature war! Fate, in the guise of the dead-letter office, waxes omnipotent and—voilà!—the worm turns. Once again, I beg you accept sincerest apologies for the unfortunate carelessness, and I await anxiously your next move.

Enclosed is my forty-fifth move: My knight captures your queen.

Sincerely,
Gossage

Epitaph, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect. Following is a touching example:

Here lie the bones of Parson Platt,
Wise, pious, humble and all that,
Who showed us life as all should live it;
Let that be said—and God forgive it!

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

The other day, at a reader's request (see here), I undertook to explain why Ayn Rand isn't taken seriously by moral philosophers. I came up with five reasons (see here). I was somewhat surprised, a day or so later, to receive a letter (see here) from a reader who claimed that Rand isn't taken seriously because (to paraphrase) she's not a good philosopher (i.e., her philosophical work is not of high quality).

What surprised me about this letter is that I was exploring nonrational grounds for dismissing Rand. I thought that was clear from my post. Maybe it wasn't, in which case, mea culpa. Obviously, there are both rational and nonrational grounds for disregarding or dismissing someone's work. The rational grounds have to do with the merits of the work; the nonrational grounds have to do with things extraneous to the work, such as the sex of its author or whether he or she is properly credentialed.

Wouldn't it be nice if, in at least one discipline, such as philosophy, all judgments of the work of others were made on rational grounds? Nothing extraneous would ever be brought to bear. Every philosopher would attend only to the intrinsic merits of the work in question. Indeed, there would be no need to know who wrote the work, for that has no bearing on its quality. The work is a free-floating entity, as it were, with no history, context, or author. I suppose that's the idea behind blind refereeing. If I don't know who wrote what I'm reading, I can't very well hold the author's identity or characteristics against him or her (or, conversely, use these things as a basis for making a favorable judgment).

This is, of course, fantasy. There is no ideal philosophical world. Philosophers don't unlearn racism, sexism, and elitism in graduate school. If anything, advanced philosophical study intensifies these attitudes. Does anyone out there deny that philosophy, as a profession, has excluded women? It might be said that there used to be sexism in the profession, just as there used to be slavery in society, but that it's been eradicated. Ha! If you believe that, stop reading; I have nothing further to say to you. There is ample reason to believe that sexism is alive and well in the academy, and philosophy is no exception. So it's an open question whether Ayn Rand is taken less seriously as a philosopher than a corresponding male would be. I believe she is, which is why I listed sexism as one of the five reasons.

Another reader wrote with what appeared to be counterexamples to my explanation. Not all female philosophers are disrespected, he said, citing a female philosopher who, in his judgment, hasn't been disrespected. (Perhaps he should walk a day in a female philosopher's shoes.) Not all uncredentialed philosophers are disrespected. Not all defenders of egoism and capitalism are dismissed as intellectual lightweights. Robert Nozick wasn't. And so on, ad nauseam.

This misconceives what I was doing. I wasn't stating a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for disrespect. I wasn't even stating a set of individually sufficient conditions! I was stating factors. I made no claim about the comparative importance of the factors I listed (i.e., how much each weighs). Perhaps sexism plays only a small role, or none at all, in the case of Rand. But we know that it has played a role in the history of the discipline, and continues to play a role, so is it unreasonable to speculate that it plays a role, however small, in the dismissive attitude toward Rand? Am I completely off the wall with this?

Suppose my car is running ragged (as in fact it is). There may be several factors to account for it (i.e., several reasons why it's running ragged): dirty spark plugs, bad wires, a dirty air cleaner, cheap gasoline, &c. Any single one of these factors may be insufficient to make the car run ragged, but together, they do the job. This is the kind of claim I was making about Ayn Rand. I was trying to identify the factors (explanatory reasons) that, together, explain her poor reputation among moral philosophers. And I was focusing on the nonrational factors rather than the rational factors, for surely there are some of each (since we don't live in the aforementioned fantasy world).

I might add, in passing, that philosophy is as subject to fads, fashions, and fancies as any other discipline. Perhaps more so. It is laughable to think that publication decisions by referees and editors are made solely on the basis of the merits of the work in question. Good essays are rejected for extraneous reasons (they defend unpopular theories, for example, such as moral relativism, ethical egoism, or substance dualism) and bad essays are accepted for extraneous reasons (they discuss trendy, politically correct topics, for example). Philosophy has a long way to go before it can claim to be cleansed of nonrational considerations. In the meantime, we should be humble.

Dr. Burgess-Jackson,

Loved your analysis of "sooner rather than later." [See here.] I had never heard this horrible expression until Clinton made it famous. Wasn't it when he tried to assure the public that he was really, truly going to come clean about Monica?

Besides its clear flaw in logic, the phrase smacks of an obvious avoidance behavior on the lips of those who speak it. It always makes me think, "OK. Sooner is better than later, maybe. Soon is better still. But if it's the truth you're planning to tell, what's wrong with now?"

In the minds of those unaccustomed to hearing or expecting to hear the truth, I suppose, "sooner" is quite reassuring.

I'm thoroughly enjoying AnalPhilosopher. Thanks.

Katy Raymond

To the Editor:

I believe that we were right to fight the pre-emptive war against Iraq and that the president should be supported.

There are some who say Israel is to blame for the war. But there are many more Christians—millions more than there are Jews in the United States—who support the president, the war and Israel.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has done a good job protecting his people and is not, as Nicholas D. Kristof says, a "right-wing jingoist." Mr. Kristof criticizes America's support of Israel—support endorsed by a huge majority of Democrats and Republicans, presidents and members of Congress—and expresses his preference for the "honest broker" role.

Israel is an ally, and we support Israel as we support other allies. I agree with that policy.

ED KOCH
New York, May 26, 2004

[T]here has surely been a tendency, perhaps on the wane, for analytical philosophers to regard considerations about the historical, economic, or psychological background to enquiry as of merely empirical interest—no more germane to philosophical issues than they are, according to one school of literary criticism, to the worth of a poem or novel. Certainly it was once the fashion, and may still be, to castigate any attempt to question beliefs on the basis of what Nietzsche called their 'pudenda origo' as a commission of a 'genetic fallacy'.

(David E. Cooper, "Analytical and Continental Philosophy," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n.s., 94 [1993-94]: 1-18, at 6)

Roger Scruton is my favorite public intellectual. (Okay, he's right up there with Richard A. Posner.) Whether you share his values or not, you must admit that he has an uncanny ability to illuminate the commonplace and stimulate thought. (Remember: The unexamined life is not worth living.) Scruton's writing is clear, direct, and engaging, despite the complexity of the subjects with which he deals. When I was a liberal, I hated Scruton. He seemed to me to be defending the indefensible. "What a waste of genius!" I thought. Now that I've "gone over" to conservatism, I love him. He inspires and teaches me. See here for Scruton's brilliant defense of stigma. I will comment on it soon.

Animal Ethics is celebrating its half-year anniversary (strictly speaking, its half anniversary) today. See here.

"Militant Islam should be confronted sooner rather than later." You see this idiom—"sooner rather than later"—all too often these days, so much so that it must be considered a cliché. Bryan A. Garner says it's illogical: "Sooner and not later than what?" (A Dictionary of Modern American Usage [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998], 610). Garner suggests replacing the idiom with "soon."

Paula LaRocque writes a writing column for The Dallas Morning News. The other day (see here) she endorsed "sooner rather than later." I wrote to complain, saying it should be "soon rather than later" (if not Garner's more elegant "soon"). Think about it. Suppose my family can vacation at any time during the summer. I might ask my children, "Do you want to vacation soon, or later?" Makes sense, doesn't it? My children might reply (in unison), "We want to go soon rather than later!" I submit that this makes sense and is an improvement on "sooner rather than later."

LaRocque did not agree. She said that, to preserve parallelism, the expression would have to be "soon rather than late." But "soon" and "late" aren't on a par with one another. "Early," not "soon," contrasts with "late." "I'd rather go early than late" is fine, but LaRocque's proposal is not. She's insisting on parallelism between nonparallel terms. That's like insisting on marriage for those for whom it's not appropriate, such as homosexuals. Repeat the following until you know it by heart: Likes should be treated alike; unlikes should be treated differently. This Aristotelian principle applies in grammar as well as in morality, which should not surprise us, since there's a grammar (logic) of morality.

John Ray responds here to a letter I recently forwarded to him. See here for an elaboration of the letter and a lot of AnalPhilosopher bashing. (I probably deserve it.) Thanks, John. Well done!

Suffrage, n. Expression of opinion by means of a ballot. The right of suffrage (which is held to be both a privilege and a duty) means, as commonly interpreted, the right to vote for the man of another man's choice, and is highly prized. Refusal to do so has the bad name of "incivism." The incivilian, however, cannot be properly arraigned for his crime, for there is no legitimate accuser. If the accuser is himself guilty he has no standing in the court of opinion; if not, he profits by the crime, for A's abstention from voting gives greater weight to the vote of B. By female suffrage is meant the right of a woman to vote as some man tells her to. It is based on female responsibility, which is somewhat limited. The woman most eager to jump out of her petticoat to assert her rights is first to jump back into it when threatened with a switching for misusing them.

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

Be honest. Al Gore scares you, doesn't he? You don't know what he'll do or say next. Did you see or hear any of his speech yesterday? Here is John Podhoretz's column on Gore in today's New York Post. Just to show you that this blog entry isn't partisan, I'm not afraid of a John Kerry presidency. I believe he's emotionally stable (even if not perfectly healthy) and intellectually responsible (although often confused and sometimes dishonest). Al Gore is neither stable nor responsible. That he came close to occupying the White House should give all of us pause. If you're religious, please thank your god for sparing us a Gore presidency.

What is it with Gore, anyway? It's tempting to say that the narrow defeat by George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election made him snap; but he's been loopy and imbalanced for years. He did not—repeat, did not—invent the Internet. And don't say he didn't say he did. He most certainly implied that he did. His environmental views are positively nutty. But most importantly, he lacks self-control. That's the most important character trait for any adult, but it's crucial for the Commander in Chief. I don't think any fair-minded observer can say, honestly, that Al Gore has better character than George W. Bush. Al Gore is an impetuous, imperious boy. George W. Bush is a man.

To the Editor:

The Times reports, with insufficient embarrassment, that it has been snookered for more than two years on the subject of Iraq by the Bush administration.

There must be a lesson here somewhere. Perhaps it is this: Don't believe anything this administration says unless it can be independently verified.

The instinct to jump into print should have been constrained by the responsibility to check the facts. Instead, The Times found itself used, consciously or not, as a Bush propaganda organ to drum up support for the Iraq war.

ROGER LIPPMAN
Seattle, May 26, 2004

Tim Peck sent a link to this stimulating essay (by George Weigel) about Just War Theory. Thanks, Tim!

Dear Dr.

I think you did a good job of describing the outlook many liberals have adopted. [See here.] There are, of course, many other reasons why people choose liberalism, not the least of which is the logic that portrays liberalism as a more righteous philosophy. But even this view hides liberalism's inherent weakness, which is a collectivist way of thinking. Many discover through their years before adulthood that success usually comes only with talent—academic, athletic, etc. (even beauty and grace are talents)—and that many have little chance of developing talent without a lot of work and sacrifice. In short, many do not want to make the sacrifice. Liberal thought allows these citizens to become society's victims, a role many are only too happy to play, in some cases for the rest of their lives.

On another front, liberals believe that crime is a result of poverty; that crime can be eradicated by leveling the playing field through income redistribution and government involvement. But we know that poverty is a temporary condition; that those in it can move out of it if they are willing to change and make sacrifices. Unfortunately, many are not up to the task. My point is that many are liberals not because they embrace the philosophy, but because they are the "beneficiaries" of liberal thinking (parasites). Conservatism has no parasites.

Conservatives believe in individual responsibility—liberals believe in group responsibility. Liberals also (falsely) support the idea that every citizen has a right to achieve the American dream and that achieving this dream can only be accomplished by redistribution. Who is to say that those living at or near poverty have not lived their American dream? Those who've lived their lives in freedom, had access to public education, access to the most "linked" citizenry in the world? Liberals don't understand that the American dream has more to do with the "chance" for opportunity than trying to make everyone equal through government intervention. The real American dream is making a home, raising a family, contributing to one's neighborhood and society—and that has little to do with redistribution.

Thanks for a thoughtful article. Keep them coming. We need more people like you debunking liberal myths.

P.S. Winston Churchill once said, "Any man who is twenty and not a liberal has no heart. And any man who by age forty is not a conservative has no conscience."

Feminist ideas had been articulated for centuries by writers like Christine de Pisan, Mary Wollstonecraft, George Sand, and a host of others, and a feminist movement arose during the French Revolution. But feminism as a widespread political movement dates to 1848 and the Seneca Falls movement in the United States. Smaller and more fragmented than workers' movements, feminism was even more threatening. It distressed all men, not just the elite, by creating discord at home, and unlike workers' protests, by challenging men where they are most vulnerable, in their self-definition. In this century, feminism has achieved striking successes in gaining women access to education, political rights, and jobs and in eliminating laws enforcing a double standard, mainly in industrialized and socialist states. Feminism has so many forms that many scholars refer to feminisms. I define as "feminist" any attempt to improve the lot of any group of women through female solidarity and a female perspective. Considering the power and solidarity of the forces arrayed against them, feminists' success in improving women's lot in so brief a time is dazzling.

(Marilyn French, The War Against Women [New York: Ballantine Books, 1993 (1992)], 12)

Edward S. (Ted) Hinchman, a philosopher at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, kindly sent a link to this essay of his on evil. It's in PDF format, but I assume everyone, by this time, has the proper reader. It may take a few seconds to open, but it's worth it. Here is Ted's homepage.

Harmlessly passing your time in the grassland away;
Only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air.
You better watch out,
There may be dogs about
I've looked over Jordan, and I have seen,
Things are not what they seem.

What do you get for pretending the danger's not real.
Meek and obedient you follow the leader
Down well trodden corridors, into the valley of steel.
What a surprise!
A look of terminal shock in your eyes.
Now things are really what they seem.
No, this is no bad dream.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want
He makes me down to lie
Through pastures green He leadeth me the silent waters by.
With bright knives He releaseth my soul.
He maketh me to hang on hooks in high places.
He converteth me to lamb cutlets,
For lo, He hath great power, and great hunger.
When cometh the day we lowly ones,
Through quiet reflection, and great dedication,
Master the art of karate.
Lo, we shall rise up,
And then we'll make the bugger's eyes water.

Bleating and babbling we fell on his neck with a scream.
Wave upon wave of demented avengers
March cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.

Have you heard the news?
The dogs are dead!
You better stay home
And do as you're told.
Get out of the road if you want to grow old.

As if I'm not busy enough already, I started a new blog. See here. If you're reading this, Len Carrier, please go to the new blog and read the first post.

Americans are blessed. Our grocery stores are filled to the brim with produce from all over the world. Cheap, wholesome fruits and vegetables, fresh and crisp, ready for cooking or for eating raw. Where else in the history of the world has there been such bounty? And what brings it to us? The free market: Adam Smith's invisible hand. Support the free market. It's the source of most of what we hold dear.

This essay by Zachary Selden is worth your time. (Thanks to James Taranto of Best of the Web Today for the link.)

I assume that each of us is justified in believing in the existence of minds other than our own. It need not be the case that each of us is able to produce an argument in support of this belief. We might very well be justified in maintaining it because of its effectiveness in organizing and integrating our experience. This could be true even if we were not able to say precisely how this belief was supported by other beliefs. Similarly, a theist might be justified in believing in God because of the way this belief unified her experience even if the believer found it difficult or impossible to make explicit how this belief provides greater unity than alternatives.

(David M. Holley, "Should Believers Be Interested in Arguments for God's Existence?" American Philosophical Quarterly 20 [October 1983]: 383-9, at 385)

1. Do you believe there are good people? I'm not talking about right actions. I'm talking about good people. What makes a person good (assuming you think there are some)? In other words, what's your criterion of personal goodness?

2. Do you believe there are bad people? I'm not talking about wrong actions. I'm talking about bad people. What makes a person bad (assuming you think there are some)? In other words, what's your criterion of personal badness?

3. Do you believe there are evil people? How does being bad differ, if at all, from being evil? If there's no difference, do you prefer using "bad" to "evil"? Why? If you believe there are evil people, name some and explain why you adjudge them evil. Who's the most evil person to have lived? Give reasons for your answer.

4. Were the people who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon evil?

5. Do evil people deserve to be punished? If you say no, do good people deserve to be rewarded? I'm not asking whether evil people should be punished, all things considered, but whether they deserve to be punished. (It's not always right, all things considered, to give people what they deserve.)

6. What's the relation between being evil and acting wrongly? Be specific.

7. What punishment do evil people deserve (assuming you think they deserve it)? Are there degrees of evil? Must punishment be proportional to the degree of evil?

8. If you believe there are evil people, are they born that way? If not, what makes them evil?

9. Is it possible to reason with evil people? If you answer yes, explain how one does it, or how you would do it.

10. If someone is evil and has expressed an intention to harm you or your loved ones, is it morally permissible for you to prevent it, or do you have to wait until the agent acts before defending yourself (and them)?

11. Are people responsible for their conduct?

12. Are people responsible for their character?

See here and here for Tom Regan's new book.

To the Editor:

"The President's Speech" (editorial, May 25) is another example of why we have a problem with the not-so-subtle agenda of the news media.

No matter what the president says, no matter how complicated the situation in Iraq is and no matter the intricacies of trying to reform a country, you inject negativity.

What are you demanding to be told? What is a "specific plan"? To what level of detail do you want the president to define this plan?

You need to reflect on the meaning of being in a war on terrorism and the fact that Iraq is the current battlefield. Detailed planning is subject to too many vagaries against barbaric enemies who know no niceties of war.

It would not be in our best interest to telegraph our intent and, to use your words, "explain to us how he intends" to carry out a detailed plan.

WARREN A. MANISON
Potomac, Md., May 25, 2004

Duty, n. That which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire.

Sir Lavender Portwine, in favor at court,
Was wroth at his master, who'd kissed Lady Port.
His anger provoked him to take the king's head,
But duty prevailed, and he took the king's bread,
Instead.
G. J.

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

It's undeniable that PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) is controversial. Sometimes I think controversy is its objective. By why would that be, unless it were clear that controversy advanced PETA's goals? Is it clear? Let's think about it.

There are four categories of people (logically):

1. Those who treat animals respectfully no matter what PETA does.

2. Those who treat animals disrespectfully no matter what PETA does.

3. Those who treat animals respectfully as a result of what PETA does.

4. Those who treat animals disrespectfully as a result of what PETA does.

Let's call those in categories 3 and 4, respectively, converts and perverts. Both converts and perverts, by definition, have been affected (influenced) by PETA's actions, but in different ways. Converts are those who, but for PETA, would continue to eat meat, wear leather, &c. Perverts are those who, but for PETA, would become vegetarians, or at least take seriously arguments for vegetarianism.

Whenever I talk like this in front of PETA members or sympathizers, I'm told that category 4 is not important. Only category 3 is important. But why isn't category 4 important? If you care about animals, shouldn't you care that you're turning people away from your cause? Maybe the point is that category 4 has few or no members. But that's an empirical question concerning which, qua philosopher, I have no expertise. My own experience over the past few years suggests that category 4 has many members, not few.

Let's think about this. Imagine a thoughtful, sensitive person who grew up in an omnivorous family and who enjoys eating meat and other animal products. I think this describes most people. The person in question has a vague sense that we wrong animals by eating them, using them in experiments, and so forth, but hasn't integrated this intuition into his or her value system or web of belief. This person is ripe for the picking, philosophically. He or she will be receptive to fair-minded, clear-headed argumentation about how we should treat animals.

Along comes PETA with its bucket-of-blood campaign, paint-throwing, name-calling, woman-degrading, celebrity-mongering, publicity-whoring behavior. The person in question may have children and not appreciate the in-your-face tactics used by PETA. What does PETA say about this person? Does PETA care about this person? I assure you that PETA's tactics turn this person away, perhaps forever, from the cause of animal liberation. This person was, but no longer is, persuadable. Is this good for animals?

PETA might reply, first, that the person's behavior is irrational. Perhaps so, but that doesn't save any animals. PETA might reply, second, that this cost (alienation) is outweighed by the benefits of in-your-face campaigns. Is there any evidence of that? In other words, are there more converts than perverts? My sense is that there are more perverts than converts: More otherwise receptive people are turned off by PETA than are taken in by it. This is why I say that PETA has been a net detriment to animals. Its ends may be laudable, but its means are lousy and self-defeating. Unfortunately, PETA seems unwilling to even address this issue.

With friends like PETA, animals don't need enemies.

You forgot to add Reason #6 [see here], which, in my experience, is the actual reason why Ayn Rand hasn't achieved any real popularity among philosophers: her ideas, in technical philosophical parlance, suck. I mean, we can forget for a moment that her fictional works are stale theme-novels with hackneyed imagery and character development rivaled by the stories my 6-year old son wrote in Kindergarten this year. But can we forget that her psychology is naive (read something after Walden II to see why); her philosophy displays an ignorance of the history of the discipline (we all know philosophers hate that! well, at least philosophers who don't think philosophy began with [Gottlob] Frege, who I'm sure Rand hadn't read anyway); she brazenly commits the naturalistic fallacy, or at least goes from is to ought faster than you can say Aristotle with the correct Greek pronunciation; her egoism isn't even that interesting, particularly compared to, say, [Max] Stirner's; she rarely treats skepticism with anything but straw-men arguments (heck, the whole of Atlas Shrugged is one); "existence exists" is meaningless no matter what your theory of meaning, reference, or truth (I think of [Theodor W.] Adorno's criticism of [Søren] Kierkegaard, noting that "existence" is the most abstract concept someone could come up with, but we all know that Rand had never read either, or really had an idea of what "existence" might be, if it "exists"); etc., etc., etc. I could go on, but so many others have (for some available on the internet, I think of Friedman's criticisms, though Gary Merrill's might be more relevant to the topic of your post), and the fact that you ignore the actual criticisms in favor of claiming that people must dislike her because she was a conservative woman with no real credentials, perhaps because you aren't familiar with the standard criticisms of Rand's philosophy, or perhaps because you just want to believe that people have ulterior motives in their criticism of Rand, makes me believe that doing so would fall on deaf eyes.

Since philosophers read and actually champion plenty of philosophers who meet your criteria ([Charles S.] Peirce published in non-technical/scholarly journals; women seem do be doing OK in philosophy these days, and some—Hannah Arendt being my personal favorite, but you could add Susanne Langer, Simone de Beauvoir, and a whole host of feminists—have been quite influential in various areas; credentials are important to many, but strong lay philosophers have often made their mark; people don't seem to mind other philosophers who are widely read, except maybe [Peter] Singer, but that's because he's slightly loopy; and conservative philosophers can do well with good arguments—think of [Robert] Nozick!), I wonder at the reasoning that actually went into this post. Heck, champions of egoism and capitalism generally look elsewhere, too, presumably because they realize that Rand's work is pedestrian at best.

If I were posting an equally knee-jerk reaction to your knee-jerk reaction, I might point out that most of her fans are adolescents and people who've never really read any other political or philosophical works, and that's why she sells so well. But then I'd be ignoring the arguments against Rand's views as well. Perhaps this is more of your version of "speculative philosophy," though. No wonder so many of those anal(.) philosophers dislike it.

I posted an item on Tom Regan over at Animal Ethics. See here.

Either Chris Matthews has gone over to the left or my nascent conservatism has changed the way I view him. Has anyone else sensed a change in Matthews in the past few months? Night after night, he attacks President Bush on the war in Iraq. He seems obsessed with the idea that Vice President Cheney and a cabal of "neocons" (he loves mentioning Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Scooter Libby) are running the country, carrying water for Israel, and remaking the Middle East to conform to their imperialistic vision. I understand that Hardball is not a news program, but Matthews has lost all semblance of fairness. He's become an attack dog. I'm finding that I watch more Bill O'Reilly and less Chris Matthews with each passing day.

I got a lot of feedback on my latest Tech Central Station column, "Expiating Liberal Guilt," which is gratifying. The feedback is of all sorts: congratulatory, deprecating, irrelevant, insightful, humorous, poignant, scurrilous, incomprehensible. Here is my favorite letter:

'. . . If I'm right about this, then many liberals are guilty of projecting their own narrow and unrepresentative experience onto others . . .'

'. . . I'm only speculating here, but perhaps . . .'

TCS needs an editor.

The author of this letter, Dan, must not understand philosophy. Philosophers speculate. They meditate. They conjecture. They propound, entertain, and test hypotheses (in thought experiments). They imagine (and explore) possible but nonactual worlds. They idealize. They even draw out the implications of falsehoods! They're not always in a position to test their speculations and conjectures; but others are welcome, even encouraged, to do so.

Scientists, no less than philosophers, speculate. Indeed, some philosophers of science, such as Karl Popper, believe that science just is the process of making, and trying vigorously to refute, bold conjectures. Without speculation, there would be no knowledge.

Here, incidentally, is Robert M. Martin on speculative philosophy: "A style of philosophy that some analytic philosophers claim to find among some Continentals: it is said to ignore empirical evidence, rigorous argument, clarity, and analysis of concepts, in its characteristic attempts to construct grand schemes to unify all of reality. Hegel's thought is taken as a good example of this." (Robert M. Martin, The Philosopher's Dictionary, 3d ed. [Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002], 284)

As for the first quotation, what's wrong with saying, "If I'm right about this, then . . ."? I would have thought it was properly modest, but perhaps Dan thinks I should be more assertive (or dogmatic). Come on, Dan; cut me some slack!

This week's link is to Philosophy Talk.

Hi,

I just came upon your site and enjoyed what I read. However, I think you've overlooked a meaning of the word "problem" that should calm you down a bit over people who claim to have found a solution to one. [See here.]

In many courses, particularly those that are quantitatively oriented, students are assigned "homework problems." These "problems" do indeed have "solutions," which the students are expected to find (or construct, depending upon your view of knowledge). I believe this is what people have in mind when they refer to "problem-solving skills." Not "solving the problem of poverty amidst affluence," or some such nonsense, but "solving the four-color problem" or the like.

Bill

Geology, n. The science of the earth's crust—to which, doubtless, will be added that of its interior whenever a man shall come up garrulous out of a well. The geological formations of the globe already noted are catalogued thus: The Primary, or lower one, consists of rocks, bones of mired mules, gas-pipes, miners' tools, antique statues minus the nose, Spanish doubloons and ancestors. The Secondary is largely made up of red worms and moles. The Tertiary comprises railway tracks, patent pavements, grass, snakes, mouldy boots, beer bottles, tomato cans, intoxicated citizens, garbage, anarchists, snap-dogs and fools.

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

To the Editor:

Re "The Letters Editor and the Reader: Our Compact, Updated," by Thomas Feyer (editorial page, May 23):

Thanks to Mr. Feyer for explaining how letters are selected, but there are two points that perhaps he should consider.

First, no matter what the political leanings of The Times and its readers, more space should be allocated to dissenting opinions, lest one fall into the trap of "preaching to the choir." It is not blind acceptance of majority opinion that stimulates rational debate but rather dissension.

It is only through debate that facts are exposed and progress achieved. Issues with strong supporting arguments will survive. Those with weak ones will yield.

Second, those with organizational affiliations and anyone in politics should be allocated their own letters section. They already have ready access to the media.

That said, I agree that it is necessary for The Times to print their opinions, but not at the expense of the voice of the people. Those with specific credentials in a field should be treated like everyone else, given that an alphabet soup of letters after one's name implies more intimate knowledge but not necessarily greater understanding.

RICHARD M. FRAUENGLASS
Huntington, N.Y., May 23, 2004

To the Editor:

Thomas Feyer seems confused about what the mission of letters to the editor is. I have done a small survey of the letters published since March in which President Bush is mentioned. The results are anti-Bush, 83; pro-Bush, 15. On some days, there are no pro-Bush opinions.

Mr. Feyer purports to present "a balance of views, pro and con." He says he receives more anti-Bush letters so more of them get printed. Fair enough, but which is it? Balance of views or agenda-driven?

It's no wonder that major newspapers and other news organizations have lost credibility in the eyes of the public. If even the letters chosen have a slant, what chance does hard news have?

RON KATZ
Anaheim Hills, Calif., May 23, 2004

To the Editor:

Thomas Feyer, the letters editor, informs us that the majority of letters The Times receives are from those with a liberal viewpoint. There could be two reasons for that: liberals are more active than conservatives; and conservatives have learned that there is no need to write to The Times, because their letters will not get published.

The second reason is the more likely of the two, and suggests that The Times has a perception problem with balance.

I have written numerous letters to The Times, and 10 have been published. Perhaps that is a good record, but I did notice that those 10 were largely politically neutral even though most of the letters I have written have been decidedly conservative.

STEVE A. BROWN
Springfield, Va., May 23, 2004

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion.

(Steven Weinberg, "A Designer Universe?" The New York Review of Books 46 [21 October 1999]: 46-8, at 48)

This man's life (please take a minute to log in; it's free) gives the lie to liberalism. Liberals can't make sense of him. In the face of Alphonso Jackson and others like him, who came from nowhere and nothing to be someone, they are reduced to sputtering and stammering. Liberals, both in and out of the civil-rights industry, prefer that there aren't people like Alphonso Jackson. It is particularly galling to them that he publicly repudiates their patronizing bigotry of low expectations.

Every one of us knows someone (probably many people) who rose from poor beginnings. Some of the most successful people in our society, in terms of wealth and status, began at the bottom. Liberals and conservatives tell different stories about this. Liberals say that nobody should have to start in squalor, so they do what they can to give everyone the same start, even if that means taking from those who have and distributing it to those who haven't. Conservatives say that life is not fair (or unfair, for that matter). Where we're born—into what conditions—is a matter of fortune or misfortune. But that's just the starting point. After that, anything is possible.

Liberals have a fatalistic, pessimistic view of human potentiality. They think the most important fact about us is where we start. Conservatives think where we start is comparatively unimportant. What's important is character. You will rise as far as your character takes you. Liberals can't really make sense of those who rise from squalor. They are counterexamples—and embarrassments—to the liberal thesis. Their very existence refutes liberalism.

Liberals don't care how people make it so much as that they make it. They're outcome oriented. Conservatives care very much about how one makes it. They celebrate those who struggle against the odds; who display initiative; who sacrifice current selves for the sake of later selves; who delay satisfactions; who work hard; who are disciplined; who save and invest; who forge productive alliances with others. How much more satisfying and noble it is to make it on one's own, without handouts! Liberals seem to forget that ours is an open society, with opportunity for everyone to be or do anything.

Do you know anything about bicycling? In stage races such as the Tour de France, there are individual time trials. These are races against the clock. (Riders call them "races of truth.") It takes so long for the riders to be sent off on their time trials (several hours) that the weather can change. Sometimes the weather is favorable for riding; sometimes it's unfavorable. It could be raining or windy during the first hours of the time trial, causing riders to go slower, and dry or calm during the final hours, allowing riders to go faster. Or things could be the reverse.

Is it fair that conditions differ? No. But no attempt is made to equalize conditions. Luck is allowed to play a role in the outcome. Suppose a rider has bad luck in the prologue (the opening stage, usually short). The liberal would say that he's doomed. He got off to a bad start, so he can't win. The conservative says it's a long race and he can make up the difference. It will test his character. If he prevails, it will be all the more satisfying, for he will have overcome bad luck (adversity) as well as his rivals.

It might be said that there's a relevant disanalogy between the cases. In bicycling, there are other races. A rider can have bad luck in one stage race and good luck in another. It equals out. But each of us has only one life. Those born to disadvantage in this life don't have some other life in which to be born advantaged.

It's certainly true that each of us has only one life, but in professional bicycling, there is one stage race that towers above the others in prestige: the Tour de France. The Tour allows luck to play a role. Yes, many riders participate in more than one Tour de France, so they could have both good and bad luck in different Tours. But there's no guarantee that any rider will be back the next year. For all any rider knows, and for all the Tour organizers know, he will get one shot at winning the Tour. And yet, luck is allowed to play a role. I suspect that liberals would sing the same tune even if each of us had several lives to live, seriatim.

If I thought that being born to disadvantage all but ensured a life of poverty or misery, I would embrace liberalism. I would work to redistribute wealth so as to nullify disadvantage. But I see just the opposite. I see opportunity at every turn. I see people rising from humble beginnings to achieve success in every occupation. Let us affirm these outstanding individuals instead of turning them into freaks. The message we send to people should be one of hope, not pessimism. We should let every child know that the world is his or her oyster. How far you go, where you go, and how fast you get there depend entirely on you. You! To the extent that liberals convey a different message, liberalism will flounder.

Is anyone besides me sick to death of the Abu Ghraib story? Other bloggers, such as Old Benjamin of Advisory Opinion, have written eloquently about the journalistic overkill, so I won't add to it. What I want to do is look beneath the overkill and try to explain it. We know as surely as we know that the sun rises in the east that journalists are biased toward liberalism. Anyone who denies this cannot be taken seriously. Presumably, liberal journalists opposed the war in Iraq and would like to see John Kerry elected president. These sentiments are fine, but they should play no role in straight news coverage or analysis.

If many other Americans are sick of the excessive Abu Ghraib coverage, there will be a backlash against the media and against the Democrats who benefit from and encourage it. Nobody likes to be put upon, manipulated, or taken advantage of. The media elites seem to be preaching, even dictating, to the unwashed masses, telling them what to think, feel, and worry about. When people protest that they're tired of the Abu Ghraib story and want reporters to move on to other matters, the elite media reply, "You don't tell us what's important; we tell you what's important."

This is normative (norm-driven) journalism. It's an attempt to dictate what's important, meaningful, and remarkable—in short, what's newsworthy. Obviously, judgments of newsworthiness must be made; that's part of what it means to be a journalist. But they should not be made on the basis of ideology. Journalists refuse to listen to those who consume the news, preferring instead to preach to them from on high. Is it any wonder that people are tuning out in droves? Is it any wonder that alternative sources of information and commentary, such as the Internet, are booming? Network television viewership is at an all-time low. Fox News, which comes closer to being fair and balanced than any other television news outlet, is doing fabulously well. Is this because people want confirmation of their conservative bias or because they resent having liberalism shoved down their throats? I believe it's the latter.

Until journalists set their values aside and become impartial providers of facts, leaving it to their readers, viewers, and listeners to make sense of and evaluate those facts, they will be disrespected, even despised. You can't be both an authority and a player. You can be one or the other, but not both. Call that Keith's Law. By becoming players, journalists, like economists and other social scientists, have lost credibility and authority. It's sad. Very sad. But journalists have done it to themselves, so nobody should feel sorry for them. Only they can regain what they have lost.

Wonderful posts at one of my favorite blogs. Check it out.

Only the most dogmatic and ignorant liberal would deny the obvious: that the mainstream media is biased toward liberalism. See here. The question is not whether there is liberal bias, but why it exists and what, if anything, can be done about it. One can hope that journalists engage in self-reflection about their role and responsibilities and take steps to keep ideology out of their reportage. We expect judges to be impartial, even though they have values. Can't we expect that of journalists? Citizens, too, have a duty: to think critically and analytically about every news story they hear or read. This, to me, is the main value and function of philosophy in a democracy such as ours: to turn sheep and ostriches into critical thinkers.

It's a sad commentary on our times that certain truths can be uttered only by certain people. For example, no white person could say what Bill Cosby recently said (see here) about black underachievement. Thank you, Dr Cosby, for uttering uncomfortable truths. (And thanks to Dan Gifford for the link.)

I just listened to President Bush's speech about Iraq and Senator Joe Biden's reply on Hardball. The Democrats seem to be saying that they wouldn't do things exactly the same way as President Bush. And? No two people would do any task the same way, even boiling eggs. If the Democrats have no principled differences with President Bush, but only want to tinker with his policy, they're going to lose. Ralph Nader will capture the anti-war vote.

I've heard it said many times (usually by students in my Ethics course) that if people become vegetarians, as Peter Singer and others recommend, we'll be overrun by animals. All the cows, pigs, goats, turkeys, and chickens being confined on farms and ranches will be roaming the streets and countrysides, interfering with our activities and generally making nuisances of themselves. You will wake up one morning to see a cow munching the grass in your front yard, or a pig rooting in your garden, or a turkey pooping on your driveway, or, god forbid, a goat eating the tin cans out of your recycling bin.

I'm not sure what's supposed to follow from this. Imagine saying that slavery should not be abolished because it will result in unemployed former slaves roaming the countryside. Actually, now that I think of it, this argument was made. But surely there are more than two options: retain slavery and create anarchy. And even if there were only two options, we should opt for anarchy and the social disruption it entails rather than slavery! The former is an enormous problem; the latter is an enormity.

Perhaps the thought is this. An act is right only if it is universally prescribable. But one cannot universally prescribe that confined animals be liberated, since it will produce the aforementioned rampage. Therefore, it is not right to liberate one's own animals. The problem is that this principle proves too much. It proves, for example, that it's wrong for me to flush my toilet at five o'clock, since, if everyone did so, it would be ruinous. It proves that it's wrong for me to withdraw my savings from the bank, since, if everyone did so, it would be disastrous.

I think we can see what went wrong. It's highly unlikely that everyone, or even most people, will flush their toilets at five o'clock (although I've heard it said that halftime of the Super Bowl puts a severe strain on city sewage systems). Thus, there's no harm in my doing so. In the case of animals, it's highly unlikely that everyone will become a vegetarian at the same time. What will happen is what happens all the time in a market. Demand for a product will fall, causing producers to produce less. As demand continues to fall, marginal producers will cease production, and then the largest producers. There will no longer be a profit in producing animal flesh for human consumption.

At this point I get a different line of argument. It is said that people will be put out of work by these altered dietary choices. Those who made their living producing animal flesh, from the farmers and ranchers to the butchers, will be in trouble. But that's how markets work. Imagine making a living producing horse-drawn carriages at the time the automobile was invented. The demand for automobiles lessens the demand for your carriages, much to your chagrin. Are you wronged? No. You have no right that people buy your products. You're not wronged by their decisions to buy automobiles instead of carriages. You must adapt to the needs of consumers. We may regret that there is no longer a carriage industry, just as we regret that there are dead languages such as Latin, but nobody is wronged by their respective demises.

I sincerely hope, for the sake of the animals, that everyone who makes a living producing animal flesh for human consumption is put out of business, like the carriage producers. It won't happen overnight, but it can happen—and will, if we choose rightly. Singer and others are simply trying to move us closer to that day by rationally persuading people to change their dietary habits.

To the Editor:

Re "No Longer the Next Big Thing, Hummer Offers First Rebates" (front page, May 17):

So sales of Hummers are slipping. Abysmal gas mileage must be at least one reason. Perhaps another is that Americans are feeling less enthusiastic about driving around looking like members of a military operation.

JULIE GAUGHRAN
Chappaqua, N.Y., May 18, 2004

Dr. Burgess-Jackson:

I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for the articles you have published on Tech Central Station. [See the left of this blog for a chronological list of my twenty-two columns.] I adamantly agree with everything I have read and I will use the points you have made in future debates. I found your work, particularly "Expiating Liberal Guilt," to be an incredibly accurate, logical, and insightful look into politics in America today.

The Lewis and Clark expedition has been underway (Bryan Garner says that should be one word, not two) for ten days, the Corps of Discovery having wintered at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. The going is slow and difficult. The sandbars on the Missouri are treacherous. See here for images of the Missouri River. Let your imagination wander. If you'd like to read along with me for the next 2.3 years, let me know. It's not too late to acquire the books and catch up!

Mulatto, n. A child of two races, ashamed of both.

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

Committed to a life of purely voluntary association, egalitarian (sometimes called sectarian) cultures reject authority. Sectarians wish to live a life without coercion or authority, a life exemplified by equality of condition. In the real world, sectarians attempt to reduce differences—between races, income levels, men and women, parents and children, teachers and students, or authorities and citizens. Translated into organizational terms, reducing differences means equalizing the status of different individuals and groups.

So long as it is in a minority, the sectarian culture is anti-military. Opposing authority, seeing American society as the cause of immoral differences, fearing subjugation by established institutions, egalitarians favor at most a small volunteer army. Only by sustaining a belief that their cause is entirely just, and their opponent's entirely evil, can they accept even minimal subordination to authority. Hence, they respond to such unifying slogans as "The war to end all wars," or "The war to make the world safe for democracy," or "Unconditional surrender!".

The foreign policy of egalitarianism flows naturally from its commitment to redistribution. First, there is redistribution from rich to poor countries. Second, there is redistribution from defense to domestic welfare expenditure. Third, there is redistribution of authority from government officials to mass movements, from those now in power to those left out.

How, then, do egalitarians deal with Soviet aggression? By arguing it away as a defensive response to offensive (i.e., inegalitarian) American behavior. For it is inequalities in their own country, not outrages by others, that are their chief concern. Since they are not in power—constituting, in their own minds, a permanent opposition—they do what oppositions do: they oppose.

In small doses, egalitarians are indispensible [sic] to democracy. They unmask the pretensions that governmental hierarchies are prone to. They attack the tendency to secretiveness and to shedding blame. By challenging existing presuppositions, they introduce new hypotheses into public policy. And by defending the rights of minorities, they extend civil liberties.

In large doses, however, egalitarians undermine existing authority. They increase its size and scope for redistributive purposes, while denying it legitimacy for purposes of defense. Where a nation is warlike, egalitarians, by attacking its authority, may mitigate militarism. But since they won't fight unless they can picture the enemy as a wholly evil creature, they may impose conditions (such as unconditional surrender) that prolong hostilities. Their tendency toward black and white classifications makes them dangerous allies when in government. For they will deny defense until war is upon them, and then demand fearful punishment of the aggressor.

(Aaron Wildavsky, "No War Without Dictatorship, No Peace Without Democracy: Foreign Policy as Domestic Politics," in Nuclear Rights/Nuclear Wrongs, ed. Ellen Frankel Paul et al. [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986], 176-91, at 184, 186, 190 [essay first published in 1985] [stray comma omitted])

A reader asked (see here) about Ayn Rand, who was born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum in St Petersburg, Russia, and who immigrated to the United States in 1925. How is she treated by philosophers? Not, I am sad to report, well. Here are two quotations about Rand by philosophers (from this blog).

Why is Rand not treated well? There are, off the top of my head, five reasons. First, she was not credentialed. While she attended college, she did not receive a graduate degree. Second, she wrote for a popular audience (i.e., an audience of intelligent laypeople). Third, she was a woman. Fourth, she was an egoist and a capitalist, both of which go against the academic grain. Fifth, she's envied. Let me address these reasons in turn. I welcome elaboration and criticism from other philosophers.

1. Credentials are the lifeblood of academia. They act as a qualitative filter. If all I know about X is that X has a Ph.D. degree from a reputable university, I will think highly of X and judge X's work worth reading. Ideally, I would read X's work and make an informed judgment based on its merits. But life is short; there is only so much that can be read. One cannot waste time reading inferior material. So filters—credentials—are important. Rand's lack of credentials keeps her off philosophers' reading lists.

2. Even though The American Philosophical Association encourages its members to "reach out" to the public by writing op-ed pieces, appearing on public-affairs programs, serving on committees and panels, responding to journalistic queries, and so forth, there's a feeling that these activities debase one's work. Many philosophers prefer to talk only to other philosophers and sneer at those who write for lay audiences. This is why Mortimer Adler, from whom many people have learned (or at least been exposed to) philosophy, is not highly regarded in the discipline. The mere fact that he and Rand wrote for popular audiences makes them suspect to many philosophers.

3. I won't belabor the sexism charge. Okay, I will. Philosophy, like other professions and disciplines, has not been receptive to women or to topics that are viewed as womanish. In some ways it has been downright hostile. Rand is not viewed as a hard-headed, rigorous thinker by many male philosophers, especially those who have not read her work. She's a woman, after all, hence not to be taken seriously. The irony is that Rand is said to have excelled at mathematics and logic during her university studies. She was quite hard-headed (in more than one sense of the term).

4. I recently published a long defense of ethical egoism. See the link to "Deontological Egoism" on the left of this blog. I begin the essay by saying that egoism is the Rodney Dangerfield of moral philosophy: It gets no respect. Philosophers, despite their claims to being fair and open-minded, consider certain views, such as substance dualism, moral relativism, and ethical egoism, to be nonstarters. There's a sense that these views have been refuted (once and for all) and that it is a waste of time even to discuss them. The academy also leans to the left, so anyone who defends capitalism, such as Rand, is going to be viewed with disfavor, if not outright contempt.

5. Deep down, philosophers, like other writers, want to be read. Ayn Rand is read. Many more people have read her work than that of John Rawls, W. V. O. Quine, and other darlings of academic philosophy. I'm only speculating, but I think philosophers envy Rand's literary success. People despise and belittle those they envy. Rand also had (and has) disciples. Many of them. Philosophers, like other scholars, want disciples to carry on their work and to disseminate their views, but most have only a few, if any. No self-respecting philosopher would admit it, but there is a great deal of envy of Rand in the discipline.

I might add, in closing, that there's an entry on Rand (written by Chris Matthew Sciabarra) in the second edition of Encyclopedia of Ethics, which I recently reviewed in Teaching Philosophy. The entry runs to four pages. Here is Sciabarra's penultimate paragraph:

Rand's ideas substantially influenced aspects of late-twentieth-century political culture and its emphasis on limiting the role of government in economic and social affairs. One of her most prominent admirers is Alan Greenspan, who headed President Ford's Council of Economic Advisers and went on to become chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Rand's ideas also inspired the founders of the modern Libertarian Party as well as many intellectuals in the libertarian tradition, including Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, Charles Murray, Douglas Den Uyl, Douglas Rasmussen, Tibor Machan, and Eric Mack. (Chris Matthew Sciabarra, "Ayn Rand [1905-1982]," in Encyclopedia of Ethics, 2d ed., ed. Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker [New York and London: Routledge, 2001], 1440-3, at 1442)

The encyclopedia has an entry on objectivism as well, also written by Sciabarra. But while Rand has two entries devoted to her (thanks to the editors), she is cited only four times in the entire encyclopedia, which contains 1,832 pages of text. (Karl Marx is cited sixteen times, Rawls eighty-seven.) Three of the four citations to Rand are by Sciabarra. The other is to Rand's book The Virtue of Selfishness in the entry on compromise. So here is a snapshot of moral philosophy at the end of the twentieth century, almost two decades after Rand's death, and only one philosopher thought her or her work worth mentioning. Perhaps one day Rand will be taken seriously by philosophers, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Someone in the blogosphere cracked me up with this one. (I won't increase his traffic by providing a link.) He said being a university professor in Texas is the equivalent of being a high-school teacher in "a real state." Don't you love liberals? All hat (condescension) and no cattle (ideas).

John Kerry took time out of his busy schedule to write to me. I'm flattered. Here is his letter:

Dear Friend,

We're going for it!

People all across the country are lining up to support our campaign, committing their time, energy and financial support to helping end the Bush presidency.

With amazing levels of enthusiasm and spirit from people like you, the Kerry for President campaign is shaping up as the most determined, spirited and far-reaching drive for the White House that our Party has ever waged.

As a Party we're more united than we have ever been and, every day, I wake up determined to fight for every vote, answer every challenge and seize every opportunity from now right up to Election Day. And I'm going to count on you to be with me every step of the way.

We know how much hardship George W. Bush's trail of broken promises has left in its wake—and we know how many people are counting on us to give America back its future and its hope.

You have stood with our campaign through thick and thin. I'm writing today to tell you that our campaign is being tested again.

The Bush attack machine is in full operation—pouncing on our campaign at every opportunity with the full, forceful impact of their growing $150 million war chest.

But, I promise you they won't get away with it—especially if I can count on your immediate support.

You and I won't let George W. Bush win this election by running from his own record and distorting mine with untruthful attacks. He better be ready to stand toe-to-toe and defend the dismal record of his reckless presidency—because we're here to demand an accounting of his first and last term in office.

We're off to a fantastic start. Everywhere I go, one finds levels of energy and enthusiasm that aren't usually in evidence until deep into the fall campaign. But, George Bush and the Republicans haven't seen anything yet.

We're just getting warmed up.

Before us stretch long months of effort and challenge. We have no illusions about the Republican attack machine and what our opponents will try to do to distort my record. But, standing together, we are more than equal to the task.

Don't forget what we're fighting for.

George W. Bush uses the power of the White House to protect powerful special interests. You and I will use that power to take on the pharmaceutical companies, the oil industry, the HMOs and other special interests that are standing in the way of progress, fairness and economic justice.

George W. Bush has run an inept, reckless foreign policy that has driven a wedge between America and some of her most cherished allies. You and I will restore America's leadership in the world.

George W. Bush works round the clock to protect and defend tax breaks for the wealthiest people in America. You and I will work relentlessly to put Americans back to work and to create an economy that rewards initiative and effort.

There are millions of Americans who have been hurt by policies that favor the few, who doubt whether government once again can work for them. Millions more live in fear everyday that they will lose their jobs or lose their healthcare or lose their pensions.

Our campaign is about replacing doubt with hope and replacing fear with security. It's about creating thousands of new jobs and replacing broken promises with a real plan.

Act today to help wage a campaign in which we stand up for what we believe in—and win. Your immediate donation in as generous an amount as you can possibly afford will help carry our values to victory.

Thank you for standing with me and for your passionate commitment to our cause. Now let's go for it!

Sincerely,

John Kerry

Sloppy writing is a sign of sloppy thinking. It grates on me to read that the answer to some problem is such-and-such. No. One answers questions, not problems. Nor are problems fixed. Broken things such as bicycles are fixed. Problems are solved. Here are the proper locutions:

• answer a question
• solve (or tackle) a problem
• fix (or repair) what's broken
• remedy (or right) a wrong
• cure a disease (or ill)
• resolve a doubt (or dilemma)
• address (or resolve) an issue
• correct an error
• rectify an injustice

As you were.

'Ethics' comes from the Greek ethos, character, and 'morality' from the Latin mores, which refers to character or to custom and habit. The two words are often used interchangeably, or with rather uncertain differences, as in the phrases "personal morality" and "professional ethics." Recently, however, influential arguments have been put forward to the effect that there is a sharp theoretical distinction—that ethics is the broader notion and includes much that falls outside morality. These arguments crystallize an attitude which is commonly found in work on ancient ethics and in modern virtue ethics and is widespread in an implicit form. On this view, ethics, especially ancient ethics, forms an alternative to morality: It lacks characteristic narrow features of morality while still being concerned with the subject matter of morality—how we should live and what we should do. Although people who argue for this distinction often do so in a way unfavorable to morality, the distinction itself does not compel any particular relative evaluation of ethics and morality. It is also compatible with a variety of views as to how central to our own outlook morality is, and thus how available to us ethics is, when considered as an alternative. (The most common combination of views is one that is critical of morality but considers it inescapably part of our outlook.)

(Julia Annas, "Ethics and Morality," in Encyclopedia of Ethics, 2d ed., ed. Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker [New York and London: Routledge, 2001], 485-7, at 485 [italics in original])

Andrew McCarthy, a former United States attorney, argues (here) that our enemy is not terror but militant Islam. He's right, and the sooner we conform our thinking to what he says, the safer we'll be. This essay is worth your time. It appeared in my local newspaper, The Dallas Morning News, yesterday.

Prof Burgess-Jackson,

In this post, you said that your children could pick their own names. That makes sense given the rest of the post, but what if they choose to honor you as well as your wife (and both of her parents), yielding something like Burgess-Jackson-Jones-Smith? Imagine the same thing over a couple generations: Burgess-Jackson-Jones-Smith-Johnson-Thompson-Hernandez-van Landingham. Perhaps the paternal name practice is more practical than paternalistic.

W'all right
It's 1969 okay
W'all across the U.S.A.
It's another year for me and you
Another year with nothin' to do
It's another year for me and you
'nother year with nothin' to do
Now last year I was twenty-one
I didn't have a lot of fun
So now I'm gonna be twenty-two
I say "oh my and a, a boo hoo"
So now I'm gonna be twenty-two
Oh my and a, a boo hoo
It's 1969 okay
W'all across the U.S.A.
It's another year for me and you
'nother year with nothin' to do
It's 1969
It's 1969
It's 1969, babuh
It's 1969, babuh
It's 1969
It's 1969
It's 1969
It's 1969
It's 1969, babuh
It's 1969, babuh
It's 1969, babuhhhhhaaaaaagggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Babuh

To the Editor:

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge have provided a road map to liberal Americans. It appears to an observer in the middle that conservatives are well organized and determined folk at play in the political fields with a rather disorganized liberal opposition. Given, as the authors indicate, that brains and brawn on both sides are about even, what explains liberals' inability to compete?

Conservatives would say it is the cogency of their ideas, and perhaps this is so, but perhaps it is something else. Many liberals regard their ideas as being received wisdom from on high, as being so obviously true they do not require explication. This type of complacency cedes the field to the conservatives. It is, simply speaking, stultifying smugness.

PAUL BLOUSTEIN
Cincinnati, May 18, 2004

This Yale student thinks one's moral and political values remain the same throughout life. Ha! He will be as conservative as his parents in twenty years, at which time he will rail against the liberal naiveté of young people. Our bodies develop. Wouldn't it be strange if our minds didn't?

Senate, n. A body of elderly gentlemen charged with high duties and misdemeanors.

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

Keith,

I have been a big Ayn Rand fan for over 25 years now. It seems to me, though, that among both conservatives and philosophy types she is not taken as seriously as I would think she should be. Do you agree with me? Do philosophy students study her work? Is she not "revered" because she chose to publish her ideas through novels?

In retrospect, I was too hard on Sanchez and the "Y" guy this morning. See here. They made me mad with their insulting remarks. But they're kids. When I reflect on how naive and arrogant I was when I was their age, it takes some of the sting away. They'll grow up. With experience comes wisdom, judgment, and perspective. I predict that if they save their blogs, they'll laugh at them twenty years from now, just as I shake my head in wonder at what I wrote in my journal twenty years ago. If they protest by saying, "No way; I'll always be liberal," all I can say is, "I was to the left of you when I was your age; now look at me."

Dr Julian Baggini, editor of The Philosophers' Magazine, asked me to write a short obituary of Joel Feinberg. The version I sent to him this morning was twice as long as he requested, so, despite my plea for an exception to the 300-word rule, it will have to be cut in half. Here is the full version:

The discipline of philosophy lost one of its kindest and gentlest souls on 29 March 2004, when Joel Feinberg succumbed to Parkinson's disease. He had been diagnosed with the disease seventeen years earlier. He was seventy-seven.

Feinberg was born in Detroit, Michigan, on 19 October 1926. He enrolled at The University of Michigan (in Ann Arbor) in February 1947, having served in the United States Army during World War II. In 1957, the year after his father Abraham died, he earned his Ph.D. degree with a dissertation entitled "Naturalism and Liberalism in the Philosophy of Ralph Barton Perry." It was not until 1960, when Feinberg was thirty-three years old, that he published his first philosophical essay.

During the next four decades, while teaching at Brown, Princeton, UCLA, Rockefeller, and Arizona, his scholarly output was prodigious. Within a few years of his joining the Department of Philosophy at Arizona, it had attracted several other prominent philosophers and become one of the top programs in the United States. Feinberg was honored by his philosophical peers in 1981 by being elected president of the Pacific Division of The American Philosophical Association. In 1988, he was one of the first professors to be designated Regents Professor at The University of Arizona.

Liberalism was Feinberg's focus throughout his career. During the 1980s, he wrote his magnum opus, the four-volume Moral Limits of the Criminal Law: Harm to Others (1984); Offense to Others (1985); Harm to Self (1986); and Harmless Wrongdoing (1988). Feinberg's aim in this massive work (which he called his "tetralogy") was not to provide a foundation for liberalism (he disclaimed any attempt to discover or prove first principles), but to work out a coherent and plausible liberal approach to the problem of the moral limits of the criminal law. At least one state supreme court has cited Feinberg as a persuasive authority. (See Armstrong v. Montana, 296 Mont. 361, 989 P.2d 364 [1999] [holding that a Montana statute prohibiting physician assistants from performing abortions violated the privacy, equal-protection, and bill-of-attainder provisions of the Montana constitution].)

Feinberg's work is best characterized as social philosophy, which was the title of his widely used and much-cited 1973 book. In addition to the moral limits of the criminal law, he was interested in and made original contributions to our understanding of responsibility, rights, justice, liberty, autonomy, fulfillment, and other legal, moral, and political concepts. His textbook, Reason and Responsibility, which appeared in 1965 and is still being used (the eleventh edition was published in 2002), is said to be the best-selling philosophy textbook of all time. Feinberg proves that original, important philosophical work is compatible with textbook writing. Late in life, he published a little book entitled Doing Philosophy: A Guide to the Writing of Philosophy Papers.

It is fitting that Feinberg wrote a book on writing, for his writing style is justly famous and much emulated. His writing is clear, simple, and penetrating, despite the complexity of the issues and concepts with which he grappled. It would not be an exaggeration to describe his writing as beautiful. Several generations of philosophers admired and learned from Feinberg, both substantively and stylistically. Many of his students have gone on to prominent careers of their own, both in law and in philosophy (some in both). In 1994, one of his students, Jules Coleman, and a former colleague, Allen Buchanan, edited a collection of essays devoted to Feinberg's work: In Harm's Way: Essays in Honor of Joel Feinberg. The title was appropriate, given Feinberg's work on the moral limits of the criminal law and his stature within the discipline.

Feinberg is survived by his loving wife Betty (to whom all four volumes of The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law were dedicated), his son Benjamin of Asheville, North Carolina, and his daughter Melissa of Alexandria, Virginia. He will be dearly missed by all who knew him.

For an almost-complete bibliography of Feinberg's work, see here.

In case you're interested, here is a site with several obituaries, plus a nice color image of Joel. I discovered it after submitting my obituary.

Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.

Megaceph, chosen to serve the State
In the halls of legislative debate,
One day with all his credentials came
To the capitol's door and announced his name.
The doorkeeper looked, with a comical twist
Of the face, at the eminent egotist,
And said: "Go away, for we settle here
All manner of questions, knotty and queer,
And we cannot have, when the speaker demands
To be told how every member stands,
A man who to all things under the sky
Assents by eternally voting 'I'."

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

We forget, at our peril, that a thinker, at least the sort of thinker we might hope emerges from a philosophical education, is and has to be a person, with all that that involves in terms of integrity, consistency and development of character.

("Editorial: Virtual Philosophy," Philosophy: The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy 79 [January 2004]: 1-2, at 2)

Dear Professor Burgess-Jackson,

I'm sorry to see you were the brunt of such vintage dastardly abuse at the hands of ever vile and loathsome Matthew Yglesias and Julian Sanchez. [See here.] I happen to regularly read their blogs, this for over a year now (yes, I know . . . but they occasionally post worthwhile things). I confidently assay they're among the most self-servingly tendentious, pencil-dicked, dwarfish little "last man" jack-ass-worshippers I've ever suffered to read. (N.B.: Descriptions can be perfectly abusive and yet not susceptible of fallacies ad hominem, contingent upon careful a posteriori circumstances which these dwarfs certainly elicit).

They happen to have rather some "clout" in the blogosphere (i.e. in the journalistic-politico blogosphere), especially the "Y" guy. Sanchez publishes in Reason Magazine. The estimable Hugh Hewitt, via his nationally syndicated radio show, now features Matthew Yglesias as a once-a-week guest interlocutor.

T'would be an occasion greatly relished, were you to REALLY take down Yglesias and Sanchez. I speak for others in saying this. They're Exhibit A of "contemporary-academic-philosophic-fundamentalism" (Jaffa's quaint term), constituting THE cancer at the heart of the Regime. Though are not academics, they do bidding as toadies for debonair nihilism's main propaganda agencies.

You should serve up fulsome concoctions of deadly whup-ass, delivered in seriatim as dialectical kicks to their demonic heads.

To the Editor:

Many people are stating as fact that President Bush lied about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, and that the Bush team's planning for the war and its aftermath has been one big bungled operation. Both these assertions are wrong.

Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and the United Nations all thought like Mr. Bush that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Either they were all lying, or none of them were lying.

As for planning, there have been far fewer bungles in this war than in past wars. If Franklin D. Roosevelt, George C. Marshall, Winston Churchill and Dwight D. Eisenhower had been subjected to the kind of minute-to-minute scrutiny and public polling that the Bush team is subjected to today, none of them would have lasted long during World War II.

MARK R. GODBURN
Great Barrington, Mass., May 21, 2004

James M. Silbermann, "The North American Free Trade Agreement's Effect on Pharmaceutical Patents: A Bitter Pill to Swallow or a Therapeutic Solution?" Journal of Contemporary Health Law and Policy 12 (spring 1996): 607.

David Benjamin Oppenheimer, "Exacerbating the Exasperating: Title VII Liability of Employers for Sexual Harassment Committed by Their Supervisors," Cornell Law Review 81 (November 1995): 66.

Michael D. O'Mara, "Thermal Surveillance and the Fourth Amendment: Heating Up the War on Drugs," Dickinson Law Review 100 (winter 1996): 415.

Rebecca E. Zietlow, "Two Wrongs Don't Add Up to Rights: The Importance of Preserving Due Process in Light of Recent Welfare Reform Measures," American University Law Review 45 (April 1996): 1111.

Robert J. Miller, "The 'Drunken Indian': Myth Distilled into Reality Through Federal Indian Alcohol Policy," Arizona State Law Journal 28 (spring 1996): 223.

Dear Keith,

Not all Christians believe in an immortal soul. [See here.] The Christian hope is resurrection and nothing after death until God "remembers" us. We may think we are important, but God thinks so too, as he also thinks the sparrow is important.

I'm pleased to see that my latest Tech Central Station column, "Expiating Liberal Guilt," generated discussion in the blogosphere as well as in the feedback section of TCS. See here, here, and here. (Thanks to John Ray and Old Benjamin for bringing these sites to my attention. I've never visited them and almost certainly never will again.) Note the sneering, personal tone of Sanchez and the guy whose name starts with "Y." (Are these academics? They must not be, or I'd have heard of them. Either that or they don't publish.) That, in my experience, is typical of liberals. They can't persuade rationally, since their views are so implausible, so they attack the person.

Speaking of implausibility, note the assumption in at least two of the blogs that even personal character (dispositions) is a function of luck. So everything—all the way down—is luck. There is no place for merit, desert, or responsibility. That, of course, dissolves the person—a point I've been making in my TCS columns. I should think that the dissolution of the person is a reductio ad absurdum of the liberal thesis, but then, liberals have been known to embrace comfortable absurdities. They participate in what Roger Scruton calls "the joyous work of falsehood."

By the way, in response to the "Y" guy, I was tenured in the University of Texas system before Brian Leiter even came to Texas, so it would have been a little hard for him to keep me out of the system. I have no doubt, however, that he would have tried, given his demonstrated inability to keep his left-wing political views out of his academic work. I don't know about UT-Austin, but we at UT-Arlington (a.k.a. UTA) don't let politics affect our hiring decisions. We hire the best people, whether liberal or conservative.

Each year since 1990, I have done a bike rally in Waxahachie, which is located twenty-eight miles south of downtown Dallas (as the crow flies). Waxahachie is the seat of Ellis County, which, like most Texas counties, has a beautiful stone courthouse. The Ellis County Courthouse has an interesting story behind it. See here and here. I have seen the gargoyles in person, and the one depicted at the bottom of the first website looks very much like a woman's vulva.

By the way, the city's name is pronounced Wox-a-HATCH-ee. When I moved to the Metroplex in August 1989, I rode my bike to Waxahachie every week, so I needed to pronounce the name correctly. The first people I asked didn't know how to pronounce it! I later learned that they were from Wisconsin and hadn't lived here long. I thought it might be pronounced Wax-a-HOTCH-ee. Nope.

5-21-84 Monday. I sent my usual allotment of letters this afternoon: to Mom, Aunt Clara [Strong], Aunt Dorothy [Hicks], Maryann and Ed Kunnath (friends from work at Kutinsky, Davey & Solomon), the Macomb County Circuit Court (to inquire about my law certificate), and Professor Randy Barnett. I also slipped notes into the boxes of Joel Feinberg and Jules Coleman while I was at school. I love writing letters. It is a good way to keep in touch with people, and it helps me to write better prose when it comes to doing serious work, such as writing law-review articles. I can't even begin to estimate how much my writing has improved as a result of keeping this journal for five and a half years. Suffice it to say that my serious writing is lighter, smoother, and fresher for having done "non-serious" writing. Like so many other areas of life, writing improves with practice. I am a writing machine.

A few weeks ago I bought a delightful little book entitled Lucretius on the Nature of Things, by the first century, B.C., poet Lucretius [Titus Lucretius Carus, 99/94-55/51 B.C., a Roman Epicurean]. As I flipped through the books's [sic] pages, I came across a passage which reflects my own views on death and dying:

Death, then, is naught to us, nor does it concern us a whit, inasmuch as the nature of the mind is but a mortal possession. And even as in the time gone by we felt no ill . . . ; so, when we shall be no more, when there shall have come the parting of body and soul, by whose union we are made one, you may know that nothing at all will be able to happen to us, who then will be no more, or stir our feeling. . . . (Book III, pages 133-34)

[L]ife is granted to none for freehold, to all on lease. Look back again to see how the past ages of everlasting time, before we are born, have been as naught to us. These then nature holds up to us as a mirror of the time that is to come, when we are dead and gone. Is there aught that looks terrible in this, aught that seems gloomy? Is it not a calmer rest than any sleep? (Book III, page 138)

I have often wondered about death. Not having been raised in a religious environment, I have applied my rational faculty to the problem (rather than applying or trying to interpret religious doctrine) and decided that death is not unlike the period before birth. Before birth, a "person" has no pains, no pleasures, no sensation of the passage of time, no appetites, fears, hopes, or dreams—nothing. Simply nothing. It isn't a good world (from the "person's" perspective), nor is it a bad world. It is a world apart, something else entirely. This, I take it, is the point that Lucretius is trying to make in the passages that I quoted. If so, then I wholeheartedly agree with him, for I reached a similar conclusion on my own, several years ago.

But why, if Lucretius and I are right, is there such a pervasive belief that the period of time after death is qualitatively different than [sic; should be "from"] that before birth? Why, in other words, are people so intent upon believing in the existence of an afterlife? Lucretius explains the phenomenon as follows:

[W]hen in life each man pictures to himself that it will come to pass that birds and wild beasts will mangle his body in death, he pities himself; for neither does he separate himself from the corpse, nor withdraw himself enough from the outcast body, but thinks that it is he, and, as he stands watching, taints it with his own feeling. (Book III, page 135)

The reason for belief in an afterlife, says Lucretius, is that people are self-centered. They think that the world revolves around them, and can't imagine a world in which they do not exist. I agree with Lucretius. Belief in an afterlife is a selfish response to a situation that people don't understand. People want to go on living, and find it hard to accept a state of affairs in which they do not exist, so they create a world in which they do go on living—a world in which they, of all creatures on earth, are special. The very absurdity of this state of affairs ought to strike the reader immediately. What is called for, to remove the absurdity, is a radical deëmphasis of the human condition. We—human beings—are not "special," nor are we different from other animals in terms of having an "immortal soul" (as [René] Descartes [1596-1650] imagined). We are but component parts of a great ecosystem, cogs in the giant wheel of life. And when we die, we go back into the chain of being just like every other living thing, whether it be a wilted dandelion or an African wildebeest. To contemplate this state of affairs is not, or need not be, to despair; it is to accept the most plausible, most reasonable interpretation of our existence, and hence to prepare ourselves for the future. We ought to be pleased to have lived, not desperate at having lived so briefly.

My call for the United States to get out of Iraq has nothing to do with the presidential election. It's rooted in principle. But if you think the election of John Kerry as president would be a disaster for this country, as I do, you should support immediate withdrawal. Dick Morris said last night on The O'Reilly Factor that President Bush will be defeated unless he withdraws troops from Iraq. I agree. So there are two reasons to get out, one principled and one pragmatic. (Here is Dick Morris's latest column. I regard Morris as one of the smartest political observers in the country.)

Brain, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think. That which distinguishes the man who is content to be something from the man who wishes to do something. A man of great wealth, or one who has been pitchforked into high station, has commonly such a headful of brain that his neighbors cannot keep their hats on. In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, brain is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.

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

A reader takes me to task for classifying Michael Moore as a liberal. Moore, the reader says, "is not a liberal in any sense of the word" (his emphasis). Excuse me? I assume the reader agrees with me that Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls are paradigmatic liberals, each committed to egalitarianism in the economic sphere (see here) and liberty in the social sphere. Show me where Moore's views differ from those of Dworkin and Rawls.

Here is an in-house report on a new book about animal thinking. I found it interesting, but the psychology professor whose book is being discussed gets Peter Singer wrong. He says Singer "humanizes" animals. Singer does nothing of the sort. Singer, who understands biology better than most psychologists, would never say that humans and animals are alike in all or even most respects. He says (1) that they are alike in some respects and (2) that some of the respects in which they are alike, such as being sentient, are morally relevant.

Morally responsible agents take all morally relevant considerations into account. (Yes, that's a tautology, but it bears stating.) That means animals must be taken into account when we act. Their interest in not suffering must be neither disregarded nor discounted simply because of species membership. Species, in other words, like race and sex, is morally irrelevant. Sadly, most humans don't take animals into account. They inflict suffering on them for little or no reason, such as taste, entertainment, and the production of unnecessary clothing and redundant "knowledge." This, Singer argues, is morally irresponsible.

Singer isn't imposing his values on you, so don't dismiss him as a meddler. He's trying to get you to think clearly about—and act upon—your values. He's your friend, not your enemy. If you feel as though you're being imposed on, it may be your moral scruples rather than Singer doing the imposing. Singer just reminds you of your scruples and helps you see their implications. That is what philosophers do, and have done, since Socrates. It is a noble undertaking.

I renew my call (see here) for the United States to get out of Iraq. Our mission was accomplished when Saddam Hussein's sons were killed and he was captured.

To the Editor:

Re "Disputed Strike by U.S. Leaves 40 Iraqis Dead" (front page, May 20):

With each innocent child killed by our forces, we turn a family against us. With each group of innocents slaughtered, we turn a village against us.

We're turning the whole of Iraq against us in rage and resistance that will never be subdued. And in our ever more desperate effort to salvage and justify our illegal occupation of the country, we'll turn the entire Middle East against us.

How much further do we have to go until the entire world is against us?

It's time to admit the disastrous errors of our "nation-building," bring our troops home to protect our borders (we're spreading our forces much too thin), and not make more enemies.

More than anything, this will reduce the threat of terrorism against us.

MICHAEL PRAVICA
Henderson, Nev., May 20, 2004

I'm an analytic philosopher. I'll explain what I mean by that soon—perhaps later today. In the meantime, read this essay by Richard Rorty. I think you'll enjoy it, even (especially?) if you're not a philosopher.

One thing is clear: the New Testament is fairly thickly dotted with attacks on the rich. It appears that no New Testament writer had much time for the possessors of wealth, and few of them refrained from expressing their antagonism. This consensus is significant in itself. Wealth aroused the ire of early Christians with ease.

(J. L. Houlden, Ethics and the New Testament [New York: Oxford University Press, 1977], 89 [first published in 1973])

Arizonans, like Texans, love their guns (see here), which is one reason I love Arizonans and Texans. The people who hate guns benefit from their possession by law-abiding citizens. That is a classic case of free riding. (Thanks to Dan Gifford for the link.)

Is it possible to commit adultery online? That is to say, is Internet adultery a coherent concept? The first time I saw these expressions I was dumbfounded, for it seemed that sexual intercourse was a necessary condition of adultery. How can A commit adultery with B unless A and B have sex, and how can they have sex if they're sitting in front of computer monitors in different cities, states, or countries? I was thinking of this definition (from the Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed.):

1. Violation of the marriage bed; the voluntary sexual intercourse of a married person with one of the opposite sex, whether unmarried, or married to another (the former case being technically designated single, the latter double adultery).

I'm inclined to think that this definition of adultery reflects a male perspective. Evolutionary psychologists tell us that men and women experience jealousy differently. Men are jealous of their wives' fertility. Women are jealous of their husbands' affection and commitment. (See, e.g., Martin Daly, Margo Wilson, and Suzanne J. Weghorst, "Male Sexual Jealousy," Ethology and Sociobiology 3 [1982]: 11-27.)

It's easy to see why. Evolutionarily speaking, men fear raising another man's child. This can happen only if their wives have sexual intercourse with other men. Women fear losing their husbands' resources. This can happen without the husbands having sexual intercourse with other women. To put it differently, men and women react differently to knowledge that their spouse has had sexual intercourse with another. Men are outraged. Women don't mind the infidelity if they are convinced that the sex was casual, i.e., without affection or commitment. Women are hard-wired to forgive sexual infidelity.

Let's apply this line of thought to Internet adultery. Imagine a woman who has emotional, even erotic, relationships with other men online. Her husband may not like the time she spends doing this, but unless the woman meets the man in person and has sex with him, he is no threat to the husband. Things are different with a man, however. He is creating an emotional bond with another woman that could lead to alienation from, and perhaps abandonment of, his wife. Another woman is luring him—and his resources—away.

I predict, therefore, that online relationships are viewed differently by men and women and that women have less tolerance for them than men do. Men see them as harmless diversions. Women feel threatened by them. To put it in terms of adultery, men tend not to view these online relationships as adulterous. Women tend to view them as adulterous. The concept of Internet adultery is coherent, but perhaps only from a female point of view.

Richard Doerflinger is Deputy Director of the Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. In 1989, he published an essay on assisted suicide in a special supplement to the prestigious Hastings Center Report. Here is a sentence from the second paragraph of the essay:

With the pervasive secularization of Western Culture, norms against euthanasia and suicide have to a great extent been cut loose from their religious roots to fend for themselves. (Richard Doerflinger, "Assisted Suicide: Pro-Choice or Anti-Life?" chap. 19 in The Right Thing to Do: Basic Readings in Moral Philosophy, 3d ed., ed. James Rachels [Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2003], 180-8, at 180)

This is a triply mixed metaphor. The first image is of something being cut loose. Think of a boat being cut loose from a dock or an animal being cut loose from a pen. Almost immediately, Doerflinger introduces a second image: roots. We don't cut things loose from their roots, although we do cut things off at the root (to keep them from growing back). Then, to make things worse, Doerflinger introduces a third image: fending for oneself. I suppose a case could be made that the first and third images don't clash. If the thing being cut loose is an animal, and if the animal had been provided for while tethered, then, by cutting it loose, we allow or force it to fend for itself. But this won't work for a boat or other inanimate object, which can't fend for itself.

This is bad writing. Don't mix metaphors, much less three of them. If you create an image, stay with it. You may find that the image reveals something about the topic being discussed. You may also find, as in this case, that it obscures more than it illuminates.

Keith,

I assume you posted Professor Allen's comments [see here] to demonstrate just how perversely wrong-headed so many university professors are today. Allen's grasp on history seems to be tenuous, at best.

First, the Jamestown settlers were introduced to "the addictive staple crop" by the indigenous people of the New World where it was already a much cultivated and much enjoyed staple crop. Allen's slant implies that the colonists set out to be the New World's first drug pushers. In the context of colonial times (what a concept—historical context!) the addictive qualities were neither known nor even considered. All they could possibly have considered was that tobacco produced pleasant effects and that other people back home wanted it and would pay for it.

As to the charge of "introducing forced labor" to the New World, slavery was also widely known and widely practiced with great cruelty among these indigenous cultures long before the first "white devil" set foot on their shores. The colonists brought with them accepted practices of the day (there's that historical context thing again) already well known and practiced by the natives. The professor's characterization implies that the European settlers corrupted the new continent with their evil crop and evil ways, a common revisionist theme. Why does his sort never complete the thought by pointing out that it was also the ideals of charity and equality introduced by these same settlers which led to the abolition of the evil practice of slavery in the West while it is still practiced by "indigenous cultures" in many other parts of the world today?

Secondly, throughout history every movement of a stronger culture has resulted in the absorption, destruction or dispossession of many or all of the cultures it replaces. There is no civilization where that has not been true. The Westward Expansion is far from the worst example of this universal cultural truth. In terms of historical perspective (perspective—another concept Allen might consider), American foreign intervention has been and is among the most benign in the history of the world.

Allen's agenda driven distortions, and those of his colleagues, prove that the teaching of History has been replaced in many universities by the teaching of "Histortion."

To the Editor:

Re "In Iraq, America's Shakeout Moment," by David Brooks (column, May 18): Historically, the resolutions to America's shakeout moments have been ugly, and whether Americans subsequently built "something better than what came before" is debatable at best.

Jamestown's optimistic settlers saved themselves by cultivating an addictive staple crop and by introducing forced labor (first indentured, later enslaved). Americans' move westward, moreover, destroyed or dispossessed hundreds of indigenous cultures. After all that—not to mention Mexico and Vietnam—one may well wonder whether America has any remaining innocence to shake off.

AUSTIN ALLEN
Houston, May 18, 2004
The writer is an assistant professor of history, University of Houston-Downtown.

Selfish, adj. Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.

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

David Peterson over at Order from Chaos passed along a link to this site. What goes around comes around.

A character that is both strong and good is not an unmixed blessing. One's character narrows options in life, increasing the number of things one simply could not do. This is morally and personally advantageous if it rules out behavior that is unreasonable, tacky, or simply wrong. But it also can make someone predictable, and there always are risks of becoming too rigid and predictable or of contracting excessively the zone of spontaneity in a life. Furthermore, a developed character can play a part in the complex of routines, habits, and automatic choices that makes time go quickly for people as they get older, except when they travel. Someone, of course, can have rigid patterns of behavior (in familiar situations) and display in an unusual situation that he or she, in fact, has a weak character; conversely, a strong character is compatible with a highly varied texture of life. But if familiar situations repeat themselves, the choices of the person of strong character will also repeat themselves. Someone for whom time speeds away might wish for the less-firm orientation and the less-developed character of youth. All of this should be borne in mind during the remainder of this chapter, which will be devoted to the importance and advantages of good character. One should remember also the disadvantages. Perhaps, indeed, the motto "Nothing in excess" applies even to the development of character.

(Joel J. Kupperman, Character [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], 140)

My Dear Burgess-Jackson:

It is obvious from your odious diatribe of 04/27 that you are not a true philosopher and even less of a gentleman, although you appear to be a Texas Cowboy with verbal emphysema.

You claim to be an Associate Professor of Philosophy at The University of Texas at Arlington. In fact you are a charleton.

FYI, I refer you to The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy edited by Thomas Mautner 2000.

Liberalism "a set of ideas in social and political thought which emphasizes the value of individuals' rights and individual freedom of choice and freedom from interference. The role of the state is primarily to protect these rights."

I'm sure you can find the rest of the passage if you have the courage too.

While it may be true that some "liberals" do have a social agenda it is also manifestly true that so called "conservatives" (a tribe of which I presume you to be a member) do too!

You say: "Liberals unlike conservatives, are zealous." What Cowshit! Conservatives are equally zealous!

The rest of your article is just as antidiluvian.

I would never claim that conservatives are stupid . . . consider William Buckley or Safire or even Rush.

Narrow minded, short sighted definitely and I could go further but of course you would never even let someone like me into your little Jackson Hole cabin of intellectual masturbation would you because you get the chance to broadcast your views on the basis of your PH.D credentials.

And to think a slime ball like you teaches courses on ethics.

Mister you need a remake! Start by calling Tom Morris in Wilmington, North Carolina tomorrow morning; pick up his book If Aristotle Ran General Motors.

Then read David Denby's Great Books.

I have officially put YOU in Philosophy Purgatory.

Perhaps a visit to Williamsburg, Virginia will restore your sense of proportion. While you are at it you might spend some time at The University of Virginia too to get grounded again.

Sincerely,
Tokyo, Japan Citizen

There was a poignant scene just now on ESPN2. The San Francisco Giants and Chicago Cubs were tied, 3-3, in the bottom of the tenth inning in Wrigley Field. The first batter was put out. That brought Moises Alou to the plate. His father, Felipe, is the manager of the Giants. Out came the father to replace the pitcher, thinking someone else would have a better chance to get his son out. You guessed it. Moises hit a 3-2 pitch into the left-field seats, ending the game. He was mobbed at the plate by his teammates as the Giants walked disconsolately off the field. Felipe must have been torn. Here was a great moment for his son, but his team lost. There's a perfect word for that in the English language: "bittersweet."

I love Google. I have no idea how it works, why it works, or how its creators make money. All I know is that it works. Beautifully. As a blogger, I am constantly using Google to find websites to which to link. Google is utterly reliable. Just today, I found sites devoted to the origin of the name "Burgess," the definition of "theism," and the life and work of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. I especially like the Google image search. Need an image of Nietzsche? There are dozens out there. Just type the name and scroll through the results, which are displayed instantaneously (at least if you have a high-speed Internet connection).

I make no comparative claim about the effectiveness of Google. I don't use other search engines. For all I know, some other search engine is better (faster, more thorough). But why waste my time trying to find a better search engine when Google does everything I want, just the way I want it? I'm reminded of something a friend said during a bike ride many years ago. I told him that I love Kroger mushroom spaghetti sauce. He said I might like Prego or some other name brand better. I told him I couldn't imagine anything better than the Kroger sauce I had been eating for several years. Am I being irrational? I don't think so. Given how much I like the Kroger sauce, it's highly unlikely that I'll find anything better, so it would be irrational even to experiment.

Thank you, Google. You bring the world to me.

I have made many friends via the Internet. Not all relationships are possible in cyberspace, but friendship is. Each day, I visit the sites of these friends, absorbing their wit and wisdom. They enrich my life. If you haven't visited the following sites (in no particular order), please do:

Old Benjamin of Advisory Opinion.
Dr John J. Ray of Dissecting Leftism.
Steve Rugg of JusTalkin.
Donald L. Luskin of The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid.
Steve Headley of Texas Conservative.
Dr Bill Keezer of Bill's Comments.
Peg Kaplan of what if?
Dr Bill Vallicella of Maverick Philosopher.
Ally Eskin of Who Moved My Truth?

I am proud to know each of you (and to have helped some of you). Keep up the good work.

Here is the latest from Christopher Hitchens, who, unlike most liberals, understands that there is a war going on and has a view about which side ought to win it. (Thanks to Dan Gifford for the link.)

To the Editor:

Re "Iraq on the Hustings: Too Much Finesse, Not Enough Facing Up," by Francis X. Clines (Editorial Observer, May 17):

Message to John Kerry: Americans have rarely been so upset—over Iraq, the sabotage of international relations, the economy, gas prices, health care.

All the while, George W. Bush's message remains: The sun is shining (although it's raining).

Mr. Kerry, do for us what Mr. Bush seems incapable of: Become the Great Listener.

ARTHUR JAY HARRIS
Fort Lauderdale, Fla., May 17, 2004

In order for a proposition to make a claim about the world, it must be falsifiable. Not false, but capable of being false. If no conceivable state of affairs would falsify the proposition, then it is being put forward as a stipulative definition, not as a claim about the world. This is the problem with psychological egoism and theism. The psychological egoist allows nothing to count against the thesis that all action is motivated by self-interest. The theist allows nothing to count against the proposition that God exists. Everything is compatible with psychological egoism, even Mother Teresa. Everything is compatible with the existence of God, even horrendous evil.

Anyone who claims that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq should be asked to state, for the record, what would falsify that claim. Be specific. Which weapons, if found, would falsify what you say? How much of each weapon? What we are seeing in light of the discovery of sarin in Iraq is denial that this constitutes a weapon of mass destruction. (See here for William Safire's column.) Okay. Then what would constitute a weapon of mass destruction? Again, be specific. We are going to hold you to what you say. You must answer the question in order to be credible; and we will hold you to your answer. Surely you believe in honesty and accountability.

Oh yes, if there turns out to be what you say there wasn't, will you (1) admit that you were wrong (publicly) and (2) apologize to President Bush for calling him a liar? You can't have it both ways: insisting on an apology from President Bush when he makes a mistake but not apologizing for your own mistakes.

It says everything you need to know about liberalism that it celebrates this man: a hypocrite; a megalomaniac; a charlatan; and a buffoon. Liberalism has no soul, no brain, and no backbone. It is a seething cauldron of emotion: hatred, envy, fear, anger, and guilt.

The Guys' Rules

We always hear "the rules" from the female side. Now here are the rules from the male side. These are our rules!

Please note: These are all numbered "1" ON PURPOSE!

1. Learn to work the toilet seat. You're a big girl. If it's up, put it down. We need it up, you need it down. You don't hear us complaining about you leaving it down.

1. Sunday sports. It's like the full moon or the changing of the tides. Let it be.

1. Shopping is NOT a sport. And no, we are never going to think of it that way.

1. Crying is blackmail.

1. Ask for what you want. Let us be clear on this one: Subtle hints do not work! Strong hints do not work! Obvious hints do not work! Just say it!

1. Yes and No are perfectly acceptable answers to almost every question.

1. Come to us with a problem only if you want help solving it. That's what we do. Sympathy is what your girlfriends are for.

1. A headache that lasts for 17 months is a problem. See a doctor.

1. Anything we said 6 months ago is inadmissible in an argument. In fact, all comments become null and void after 7 days.

1. If you won't dress like the Victoria's Secret girls, don't expect us to act like soap opera guys.

1. If you think you're fat, you probably are. Don't ask us.

1. If something we said can be interpreted two ways and one of the ways makes you sad or angry, we meant the other one.

1. You can either ask us to do something or tell us how you want it done. Not both. If you already know best how to do it, just do it yourself.

1. Whenever possible, please say whatever you have to say during commercials.

1. Christopher Columbus did not need directions and neither do we.

1. ALL men see in only 16 colors, like Windows default settings. Peach, for example, is a fruit, not a color. Pumpkin is also a fruit. We have no idea what mauve is.

1. If it itches, it will be scratched. We do that.

1. If we ask what is wrong and you say nothing, we will act like nothing's wrong. We know you are lying, but it is just not worth the hassle.

1. If you ask a question you don't want an answer to, expect an answer you don't want to hear.

1. When we have to go somewhere, absolutely anything you wear is fine. Really.

1. Don't ask us what we're thinking about unless you are prepared to discuss such topics as baseball, the shotgun formation, or monster trucks.

1. You have enough clothes.

1. You have too many shoes.

1. I am in shape. Round is a shape.

1. Thank you for reading this. Yes, I know, I have to sleep on the couch tonight; but did you know men really don't mind that? It's like camping.

Dr William F. (Bill) Vallicella has started a new blog, Maverick Philosopher. It is terrific. When I visit, I feel as though I am in the presence of an exquisite mind. I feel the same way when I read Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). I will put a permanent link to Bill's blog on the left of this one. Please visit regularly. You will learn and enjoy, as I do. Thanks for sharing your wisdom with us, Dr Bill. Please tell us about your desert surroundings from time to time. I miss Tucson dearly.

Gravitation, n. The tendency of all bodies to approach one another with a strength proportioned to the quantity of matter they contain—the quantity of matter they contain being ascertained by the strength of their tendency to approach one another. This is a lovely and edifying illustration of how science, having made A the proof of B, makes B the proof of A.

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

The limited significance of the legal disabilities imposed on homosexuals is shown by their increasing political assertiveness. Like other minority groups they have become a political force to be reckoned with, particularly in the cities in which they form a substantial fraction of the population. Few politicians dare nowadays to express outright antagonism to homosexuals; and in the arts world, the academy, the professions, the mass media, and other influential sectors of American society, criticism of homosexuality or homosexuals is almost as taboo as criticism of blacks, women, or Jews. The term homophobe, properly reserved for persons with a pathological fear or hatred of homosexuals, is now, like racist, an epithet apt to be bestowed on anyone who so much as questions the most extreme claims made on behalf of homosexuals. Homosexuals have persuaded many heterosexuals to refer to them by their preferred term, gay, a word from the argot of the homosexual subculture. Advocates for homosexuals have also been rather successful in convincing the American people both that homosexuals are far more numerous (10 percent of the adult population) than appears to be the case (probably no more than 3 percent) and that AIDS is a threat to everyone (rather than to discrete classes of the population, prominently including male homosexuals) and therefore that the federal government should lavishly subsidize efforts to discover a cure.

(Richard A. Posner, Sex and Reason [Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1992], 292-3 [italics in original])

My twenty-second Tech Central Station column is up. See here. I'd like to thank TCS's editor, Nick Schulz, for being so understanding and helpful, and its illustrator, Ray Patnaude, for creating such beautiful—and meaningful—images.

Twenty-three years ago today—almost half my life—I went into probate court in Oakland County, Michigan, to petition for a name change. I was born Keith Douglas Jackson on 7 April 1957. I wanted to change my name to Keith Burgess-Jackson. Although I was a law student, I was extremely nervous, because the judge could have denied my request. If the judge demanded an explanation, I was prepared to cite statutes and court cases that were, in my judgment, sexist. The idea was to demonstrate the depth of my commitment to nonsexist institutions. I wanted the judge to know I wasn't changing my name on a lark or for aesthetic reasons (or to defraud creditors).

As for where "Burgess" came from, it's my mother's maiden name, which she, like all her siblings, got from her father. It's an historic name, like "Jackson." (We've had a president and a famous general named Jackson.) The Commonwealth of Virginia had a House of Burgesses. I wanted not just my father's name, but my mother's as well. I loved both branches of my family and wanted to honor both. There was no reason to put "Burgess" first, of course. That choice was made on euphonic grounds.

Over the years, I have had many interesting reactions to my name: from students, clerks, and others. Evidently, many people think I took my wife's name. I have no wife. Nor would I ever take a partner's name. I know a man who added his wife's name to his and ended up divorcing her. He had to revert to his original name. That won't happen to me, because I'll always have the same parents.

I've also been asked what I'll do when I have children. My answer has always been that if I have children (to date, I have not), they will choose their own names. Until they're old enough to do so, my partner and I would give them some mix of our names. Or maybe they'll take their mother's name, just to shake things up. What I oppose is the mindless taking of the father's name. Why not mindlessly take the mother's name? Are mothers less important than fathers? That certainly hasn't been the case in my family.

Speaking of my mother, she must have thought I was crazy when I told her I was changing my name. She still doesn't like it, although she's accepted it. She says she wanted all four of her boys to have the same name. But we do, in a way. I still have "Jackson" in my name. I hope nobody in my family thinks I was distancing myself from the family by changing my name. Just the opposite! The idea was to become more tightly bound up with my entire family. I hope the Burgess side is just as proud of me as the Jackson side. I hope I have brought honor to both sides.

"But isn't the paternal naming practice traditional?" you ask; "and aren't you a conservative?" First, I wasn't conservative when I changed my name, so there was no question of being inconsistent at the time. But it's a good question. Must a conservative follow the tradition of taking the father's name? I don't see why. As I said yesterday, the conservative endorses a presumption in favor of tradition. How strong the presumption is, and therefore how easy it is to rebut it, depends on what's at stake. The only reason I can see for a paternal naming practice is efficiency, and surely that's not the sort of consideration that looms large to a conservative. Isn't it just as efficient to take the mother's name? Indeed, isn't it more efficient, since maternity is always more certain than paternity?

Taking the father's name symbolizes the father's superior role in the family and the male's superior role in society generally. But there is no superior role in the family or in society. Mothers and fathers are equal (albeit different); men and women are equal (albeit different). If that's feminism, then I'm a feminist. If that's incompatible with conservatism, then I'm not a good conservative. So be it.

Bertrand Arthur William Russell was born on this date in 1872. Incredibly, he lived until 1970. Not many people know that John Stuart Mill, who died in 1873, was Russell's godfather. Mill and Russell are two of the greatest philosophers who ever lived.

See here for Smallholder's letter about "humane eggs." I found it extremely interesting, and, given my consumption of eggs from "free-roaming" hens, disturbing.

News flash! Randy Johnson of the Arizona Diamondbacks, a.k.a. The Big Unit (because of his size), just pitched a perfect game against the Atlanta Braves. This is one of the rarest events in baseball. For those of you who don't know baseball (may God have mercy on your souls), this means he retired all twenty-seven batters he faced. Nobody, in other words, reached base, by hit, walk, or otherwise. A fortiori, nobody scored. Congratulations, Randy!

Here are some recipes from the world-famous Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, New York (home of Cornell University). I'm hungry just looking at them. Now if only I could cook. . . .

Anyone who has been reading this blog for more than a few days knows that I care deeply about nonhuman animals. This doesn't mean I don't care about humans. It means I don't care only about humans. Care is not a zero-sum game. Yes, there are conflicts between humans and nonhumans; but there are conflicts between humans and humans. Caring for nonhuman animals means taking them into account in one's deliberations. It means, at a minimum, not treating them as resources for human use and consumption.

It may puzzle some people that I'm conservative. Isn't concern for animals a trendy liberal idea? How can this Burgess-Jackson guy be both a conservative and a respecter of animals? He must be confused. This must be a vestige of his liberal days.

I'm not confused. If you think conservatism is incompatible with concern or respect for animals, you don't understand conservatism. Conservatism is a political morality. Like any political morality, it is concerned with the relation of individuals to the state. This explains the adjective "political." Political morality is a subset of morality. Animals, of course, are not moral agents, so they're not political agents, either. But this just means they fall outside the scope of political morality. It doesn't mean they fall outside the scope of morality. There are moral patients as well as moral agents.

Ah, you say; but isn't conservatism committed to conserving traditions, and isn't using and consuming animals traditional? This goes too fast. Yes, conservatism, unlike liberalism, is committed to conserving traditions, but not just any old traditions. Some traditions are worth conserving; others are not. Slavery is traditional in Western culture, but no self-respecting conservative defends slavery. I maintain that using and consuming animals is analogous to slavery. Conservatives should reject both.

You might think this is cheating. "How convenient! You pick and choose traditions in accordance with their worthiness." But this is no different from liberalism. The central value of liberalism is liberty, understood as the absence of constraint. Liberals aren't anarchists; they believe there are moral limits on the exercise of individual liberty. As the old saying goes, your liberty stops at the tip of my nose. Liberty, to the liberal, is intrinsically good, but it's not the only intrinsically good thing. Liberals aren't absolutists about the value of liberty.

Nor are conservatives absolutists about the value of tradition. Liberals accord a presumption to liberty. Liberty, it might be said, is innocent until proven guilty. Conservatives accord a presumption to tradition. Tradition is innocent until proven guilty. Just as the presumption in favor of liberty can be rebutted or overridden, the presumption in favor of tradition can be rebutted or overridden. Bullfighting, fox hunting, meat-eating, and rodeos, like human chattel slavery, are traditional. This creates a presumption in their favor to the conservative. But I would argue that the presumption is rebutted or overridden in each case.

When is the presumption in favor of tradition rebutted or overridden? When the tradition inflicts harm on others. Conservatives are just as concerned with harm prevention as liberals are. Ah, you say, but animals can't be harmed. Why not? To harm another is to set back his or her interests. Animals have interests. The main interest any sentient being has is not suffering. Animals also have an interest in life, just as humans do. Life is the precondition for all else of value to the individual: enjoyments, activities, experiences, and, in the case of humans, projects. Animals also have an interest in liberty. Confining animals sets this interest back. Humans harm animals in myriad ways.

Please don't equate conservatism with the views actually held by conservatives. The views of a conservative fall into two categories: essential and accidental. The essential views are those that cannot be subtracted from conservatism without making it a different political morality. The accidental views are those that can be subtracted from conservatism without making it a different political morality. I maintain that lack of concern for animals is an accidental property of conservatism. In some cases, it derives from the religious beliefs of the conservative. But religion is not essential to conservatism. I'm an atheist. I'm also conservative. Logically speaking, I can be both.

Please be good to animals. First, do no harm to them. Primum non nocere. Second, do what you can to prevent harm to them. Third, if you have it in you, work to improve their lives. Let's start a new tradition of compassion, concern, care, and respect for other species. That will be a tradition worth conserving.

Scribbler, n. A professional writer whose views are antagonistic to one's own.

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

A reader objected to my use (here) of the term "reverse discrimination." I explained that the word "reverse" indicates that groups once discriminated against are now being discriminated in favor of. He wrote back testily, saying he wasn't asking for an explanation. He said it's discrimination, period. There's no need to modify the noun.

But while there may be no need to modify the noun, there's no harm in doing so, as far as I can see. Ronald Dworkin entitled one of his essays "Reverse Discrimination." (See chap. 9 in Taking Rights Seriously [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978], 223-39.) The term appears routinely both in speech and in print. What's wrong with taking note of the fact that the tables have been turned on those who once benefited from discrimination? What's wrong with indicating the direction of discrimination?

Perhaps the reader thinks the term "reverse discrimination" implies that it's not really discrimination. But that's not how modifiers work. A modified X is still an X. Male nurses are nurses, but not all nurses are male. Young dogs are dogs, but not all dogs are young. Reverse discrimination is discrimination, but not all discrimination is reverse. I actually prefer the term "reverse discrimination" to various euphemisms, such as "preferential treatment" and "affirmative action," for it makes clear that one group of individuals is benefiting at the expense of another. Whether this is justified is another matter (Dworkin says yes; I say no); but let's be clear about what we're doing.

I was fourteen
she was twelve
father travelled—hers as well—Europa . . .
down the beaches
hand in hand
twelfth of never on the sand
then war took her away
we swore a vow that day:
we'll be the Pirate Twins again, Europa
oh my country
I'll stand beside you in the rain, Europa
ta république . . .
nine years after who'd I see
on the cover of a magazine? Europa . . .
buy her singles and see all her films
paste her pictures on my windowsill
but that's not quite the same—it isn't, is it?
Europa my old friend . . .
blew in from the hoverport
she was back in London
I pushed past the papermen
calling her name
she smiled for the cameras
as a bodyguard grabbed me
then her eyes were gone for ever
as they drove her away.

The other day (see here), I mentioned that I had purchased a small bottle of Vegemite at Whole Foods Market. Dr John J. Ray, my polymathic friend Down Under, has been warning me by e-mail that I probably won't like it. Why, I'll show him! But seriously, I like it. I've tried it on saltine crackers and straight from the bottle on the tip of a butter knife. It's powerful but tasty. I may have some Aussie blood in me. What else could explain my love for AC/DC, INXS, Midnight Oil, Icehouse, The Angels from Angel City, Men at Work, and Crocodile Dundee?

This week's link is to Aesthetics On-Line.

To the Editor:

In "A Crude Shock" (column, May 14), Paul Krugman describes how the market deals with scarce oil supplies and gives the economist's view of the relevance of statistics like oil consumption per dollar of real G.D.P.

But faith in the market and statistics should not obscure the bottom line: this will be the last century of majority fossil fuel use because of the energy demands of an increasing population.

Now is the time to make historic investments in efficiency and renewable energy research and development. For the sake of today's children, we need citizenship, self-control, common sense and community spirit to sustain humanity in a world of finite resources.

ERNEST R. BEHRINGER
Ann Arbor, Mich., May 15, 2004
The writer is an associate professor of physics at Eastern Michigan University.

Step back for a moment. Think about long-term social and intellectual movements. Liberalism has been routed. Conservatism occupies the field. Liberalism prevails in certain areas, such as the academy, journalism, and entertainment, but the American people are overwhelmingly conservative, as every survey shows. See here for an interesting column about this phenomenon. As long as liberals defend reverse discrimination, coercive redistribution of wealth, and sexual promiscuity, they will be a minority party in this country. These policies go against the American grain. They might be acceptable in places like Sweden, France, and Canada, but not here. Keep it up, liberals. You're digging your grave.

As we know all too well, the world can be an unbearably sad place, and people's astonishing capacity for deliberate cruelty and brutality is one of the most striking things about them. These facts are hardly news outside of philosophy, but on the whole it cannot be said that contemporary moral philosophy has displayed much interest in them. Its focus on questions about the relative motivational importance of reason as compared with sympathetic or benevolent feeling has made it easy for philosophers to neglect the importance of sheer human viciousness: to forget that the desire to harm other people [and animals!—kbj] is one of the most prominent and enduring forces in human social life.

(Samuel Scheffler, Human Morality [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992], 136 [footnote omitted])

The only point that I would disagree with in Mr. Saletan's article [see here] is where he says, "The guards didn't understand Iraq, hated being there, and were under constant assault from Iraqi mortars outside the prison walls. To them, the inmates seemed a foreign enemy." This is (in part anyway) factually incorrect, and it misses what I consider to be a very important point psychologically. The inmates do not "seem" to be a foreign enemy; they ARE the enemy. They are the very people who, before their capture, were firing those mortars and planting the IED's (like the one with sarin in it yesterday). The abuse, while very wrong, was not perpetrated on the innocent. It's very hard to be nice to someone today who was trying to kill you yesterday, and who perhaps succeeded in killing some of your buddies the day before. But to understand is not to condone, and I think a little time in Leavenworth is needed in addition to courts martial. The guilty soldiers need to see the other side of the coin.

Here is a case (made by United States Senators Orrin Hatch and Jim Talent) for a constitutional amendment to ban homosexual "marriage." As longtime readers of this blog know, I'm on record as supporting the federalist solution, which would allow states to decide for themselves whether to allow homosexual "marriage," but the choice may be between (1) banning homosexual "marriage" everywhere (by constitutional amendment) and (2) forcing it on every state (by judicial ruling). I prefer option 1 to 2 for federalist reasons, to wit: Far more states would disallow homosexual "marriage" than would allow it, so fewer states would be thwarted by 1 than by 2.

I have always used "morality" to refer to codes dictated by religious teachings and "ethics" to refer to that code of conduct that a nonreligious person substitutes for a religious morality. [See here.] Reading the dictionary definitions, I see that other people do not make this distinction. Oh well, personally I like mine better.

I come to your site daily and enjoy your entries, especially the definitions by Ambrose Bierce. Though I have The Devil's Dictionary in my library, I don't get it down very often. The definitions on your site offer just the right amount of constant exposure.

This column by David Gelernter of The Weekly Standard is worth your time. (Thanks again to James Taranto for the link.)

John Fund of The Wall Street Journal joins the call for civility in our political discourse. See here. In my opinion, Bush hatred is far more intense and widespread than Clinton hatred. Remember: I voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, so I would have noticed. (Thanks to James Taranto of Best of the Web Today for the link.)

I feel sorry for Andrew Sullivan. I really do. He thinks a law that allows homosexuals to "marry" will validate their relationships, enhance their self-esteem (which he admits is "low"), and integrate them into society. No law can do these things. All law can do—tautologously—is change people's legal status. It can force agents of the state to do this or that; it can confer legal rights and responsibilities; it can redistribute tangible burdens and benefits. It cannot alter morality, sensibility, religious practice, or custom.

Sullivan writes in today's New York Times (see here) that, as of today in Massachusetts, homosexual couples' "love and commitment and responsibility" will be "fully cherished for the first time by the society they belong to." How does legal marriage accomplish that? Is Sullivan suggesting that love without marriage is impossible? That will come as a surprise to the thousands of heterosexual couples who love each other but are not married. And if one's commitment to and responsibility for another are affected by legal status, then, with all due respect, something was wrong with the relationship to begin with.

Law constrains action. It is external. It cannot control how people think or feel. It cannot make A love B or destroy A's love for B. It can neither generate nor undermine commitment. These things are internal (and extralegal). Sullivan must be incredibly insecure if he needs the imprimatur of the state on his relationship. Is love not love without legal recognition? Is a commitment that is not enforced by the state through law not really commitment? Is legal responsibility the only sort of responsibility? Sullivan invests entirely too much in law. He may be rudely surprised when he finds that altered legal status changes nothing about his love, commitment, or responsibility.

Allowing homosexuals to "marry" is not equality, as Sullivan says. It is injustice. Justice requires that likes be treated alike and unlikes differently. Sullivan has never made the case that heterosexuals and homosexuals are similarly situated with respect to marriage, so insisting that extending marriage rights to homosexuals constitutes "equality" begs the question. It is irresponsible, grandstanding rhetoric. Does equality require that humans be able to marry their dogs, cats, birds, or horses? Does equality require that groups of humans be able to marry? Does equality require marriage for children? Sullivan cheapens the concept of equality by applying it so mindlessly and promiscuously. He seems not to have read Aristotle.

Law cannot change attitudes. Law cannot mandate respect, esteem, or admiration. Law can enforce tolerance, but it cannot mandate acceptance. Does Sullivan really think that someone who believes that homosexual "marriage" is an abomination will change his or her mind about it simply because the law has changed? Sullivan says the "marriages" about to be effected in Massachusetts are not "gay marriages." They are, he says, "marriages."

But that's not something that can be legislated or decreed from the bench. Imagine saying that Joe and Bob are not male nurses; they're nurses. You can't make people think and speak a certain way. Joe and Bob had best get used to being called male nurses. The adjective "male" indicates deviation from the norm. But at least they're really nurses. Homosexual "marriages" will never be marriages. They won't even be homosexual marriages. They will be homosexual "marriages." Sullivan had best get used to it.

This essay shows how effeminate Canadians have become. A hardy people has become thoroughly feminized. How could Canadian men allow this to happen? Have they no self-respect? Americans must not—and will not—follow their lead. (Thanks to Dan Gifford for the link.)

Rebel, n. A proponent of a new misrule who has failed to establish it.

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

To the Editor:

It was with dismay and horror that I viewed the photo of a cowering Iraqi prisoner menaced by vicious military guard dogs at Abu Ghraib prison (front page, May 10).

As an Austrian Jew imprisoned in Dachau and Buchenwald in 1938 and 1939, I was an eyewitness to similar inhumane behavior by sadistic Nazi SS guards.

OTTO PERL
Teaneck, N.J., May 12, 2004

The myth of legitimate authority is the secular reincarnation of that religious superstition which has finally ceased to play a significant role in the affairs of men. Like Christianity, the worship of the state has its fundamentalists, its revisionists, its ecumenicists (or world-Federalists), and its theological rationale. The philosophical anarchist is the atheist of politics. . . . [T]he slow extinction of religious faith over the past two centuries may encourage us to hope that in time anarchism, like atheism, will become the accepted conviction of enlightened and rational men.

(Robert Paul Wolff, "On Violence," The Journal of Philosophy 66 [2 October 1969]: 601-16, at 616)

You may have noticed a new link directly to the left of this entry. If you click "About Me," you'll see personal information, a photograph of me in action, a link to my university homepage (which shows, inter alia, my scholarly publications), summaries of recent posts, and blogging data. This last is especially welcome to an anal-retentive person like me. I can't believe Blogger is free. There must be a catch, but in over half a year I haven't figured out what it is.

William Saletan of Slate magazine has an interesting article on why the Stanford Prison Experiment doesn't explain Abu Ghraib. See here. Conclusion: If we blame the situation, the perpetrators are absolved.

Matthew

Here is an interesting new blog by a South Carolinian named Steve. Welcome to the blogosphere, Steve! I put a permanent link on the left side of this blog.

What's the difference between ethics and morality? You don't know, do you? Join the crowd. Even philosophers don't use the terms consistently. I've heard "ethics" defined as the philosophical study of morality and "morality" defined as the philosophical study of ethics. Some philosophers, such as Bernard Williams, use the term "morality" to refer to a proper subset of ethics. Morality, they say, has to do with obligation ("ligare" = tie or bind, as in "ligament"), whereas ethics concerns what sort of people we should be as well as how we should conduct ourselves (i.e., character as well as action).

Very often I see the expression "ethical and moral," as in "Cloning has ethical and moral implications" or "Torture is unethical, immoral, and illegal." I doubt very seriously that the author of these sentences has a clear idea of the distinction. In fact, I suspect the author throws both words in just in case there is a difference between ethics and morality (or between the ethical and the moral). It's cover-your-ass writing. It's disingenuous.

Let me lay down the law. Unless you have a clear distinction in mind between ethics and morality, as Williams does (and in which case you're obliged to share it with your interlocutor), don't use both terms in a single expression, for that implies (1) that there is a difference and (2) that you know the difference. Pick a term and use it consistently. Don't fudge. Don't weasel. Don't put on airs.

As so often happens, something that began as a post for this blog turned into a column for Tech Central Station. If the editor, Nick Schulz, chooses not to publish it, I'll post it here. Either way, you'll get to read it soon. The title is "Expiating Liberal Guilt." I think you'll enjoy it.

A couple of years ago, I came across a reference to the Stanford Prison Experiment, so I read up on it. Today, John Ray reminded me of the experiment in his blog, Dissecting Leftism. Here is a site devoted to the experiment. It will help you understand how good people can do bad things. (It's easy to understand how bad people can do bad things.) Please don't confuse explanation with justification. Explaining why X was done doesn't justify the doing of X. Explanation is factual; justification is normative. They are as different as night and day.

One of my favorite bands, Judas Priest, has a song entitled "Don't Have to Be Old to Be Wise" (from British Steel [1980]). This is ambiguous. If it means that there is no correlation between age and wisdom, I disagree. If it means the correlation isn't perfect, I agree. Ally Eskin proves that you don't have to be old to be wise. See here.

Here is a short essay in support of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Almost seven months ago, I published a long column on Tech Central Station entitled "The Natural History of Bush-Hating." See here. It generated lots of feedback, both on the site and in the form of e-mail to me. Here are the ninety e-mail messages I received. Some of them, as you'll see, are supportive. Others are hostile. I appreciate both types.

A young woman was about to finish her first year of college. Like so many others her age, she considered herself a liberal and favored redistribution of wealth in America. She felt deeply ashamed that her father was a staunch conservative. One day she was challenging her father on his opposition to higher taxes on the rich (the proceeds to be used for welfare programs).

In the middle of her diatribe (which was based on lectures she had heard from her leftist professors), she was stopped by her father, who asked how she was doing in school. She replied that she had a 4.0 GPA and let him know that it was tough to maintain. She had to study all the time and could not attend parties like the other people she knew. She didn't even have time for a boyfriend. She didn't have many college friends because she spent all her time studying. She was taking a more difficult curriculum than they were.

Her father listened and then asked, "How is your friend Mary?" She replied, "Mary is barely getting by. All she has is a 2.0 GPA, and all she takes are easy classes; she never studies." She continued: "But Mary is popular on campus. College, for her, is a blast; she goes to all the parties and often doesn't show up for classes because she is too hung over." Her father then asked his daughter, "Why don't you go to the Dean's office and ask him to deduct 1.0 from your 4.0 GPA and give it to your friend who has only a 2.0?" He continued: "That way you will both have a 3.0 GPA, and certainly that would be a fair, equal distribution of GPA."

The daughter, visibly shocked by the father's suggestion, stammered, "That's not fair! I worked hard for my GPA. I did without, and Mary has done little or nothing; she played while I worked!"

The father smiled and said, "Welcome to conservatism."

Reverence, n. The spiritual attitude of a man to a god and a dog to a man.

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

Yesterday was a light blogging day, as you may have noticed. I did a bike rally in Flower Mound in the morning (my fifth of the year), graded Ethics examinations in the afternoon, and attended a commencement ceremony in the evening. I didn't spend a lot of time at the computer. The weather here in Fort Worth is gorgeous. It's warm and sunny, but we haven't experienced high relative humidity yet. I need to mow my front yard this afternoon.

I'll be done grading by Tuesday morning, at which time my fourteen-week summer break begins. (Usually I have fifteen weeks, but I had an extra week during winter break this year.) I'm looking forward to blogging this summer, as well as doing scholarly research and writing. I'm writing an essay entitled "Taking Egoism Seriously." I hope you visit my blogs regularly and keep those letters coming. Bear in mind that I'm always open to questions. If you have a philosophical question, ask away. I may or may not be able to answer it, but I'll try. Think of me as Mr Philosophy Person.

To the Editor:

Re "U.S. Training African Forces to Uproot Terrorists" (front page, May 11):

Do we learn nothing? We are now fighting in Afghanistan the warriors we trained there two decades ago. How long will it be before the ones we are training in the Sahara turn against us? Why do we go around the globe training our future enemies how better to fight us?

MARK GARRETT
Maitland, Fla., May 11, 2004

The ethical incoherence of our customary treatment of nonhumans has been demonstrated time and again by [Peter] Singer, [Tom] Regan, [S. F.] Sapontzis, [David] DeGrazia, [Evelyn] Pluhar, and others. Almost every member of the American Philosophical Association would agree that all mammals are conscious, and that all conscious experience is of some moral significance. But somehow this has no connection with one's choice of food. Like the undergraduate who listens to, and actually understands, the refutation of naive relativism, and still writes in the final exam that "no one can judge another person's morality," many philosophers suffer from a sort of inferential paralysis.

(Harlan B. Miller, review of Ethics into Action: Henry Spira and the Animal Rights Movement, by Peter Singer, Ethics: An International Journal of Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy 110 [January 2000]: 441-3, at 443 [italics in original])

Hey, your article isn't a philosophical argument, and it doesn't explain or refute liberalism at all—it's a bunch of invective in which the terms 'liberal' and 'conservative' are interchangeable (I've seen the same exact things written of conservatives by liberals, except for 'desert' and the extremely simplistic part about greed). Somebody who teaches philosophy really ought to do better than this. If I were a conservative I'd ask you to get off my team—go back to the liberals!

With all due respect—JF

Dennis R. Delaney, "Federal Guidance: A Middle of the River Approach to Water Conservation," Boston University Law Review 76 (February 1996): 375.

Scott R. Sweir, "The Tenuous Tale of the Terrible Termites: The Federal Arbitration Act and the Court's Decision to Interpret Section Two in the Broadest Possible Manner: Allied-Bruce Terminix Companies, Inc. v. Dobson," South Dakota Law Review 41 (1996): 131.

Robert Almeder, "Dretske's Dreadful Question," Philosophia 24 (December 1995): 449; Fred Dretske, "Dretske's Awful Answer," Philosophia 24 (December 1995): 459.

Jeanette Kennett and Michael Smith, "Frog and Toad Lose Control," Analysis 56 (April 1996): 63.

Mark Heller, "The Mad Scientist Meets the Robot Cats: Compatibilism, Kinds and Counterexamples," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 56 (June 1996): 333.

I just made my daily visit to Bill Keezer's aptly named blog, Bill's Comments. His posts for the day are, as usual, thoughtful and interesting. Here is Bill's reflection on capital punishment. By the way, Bill just hit 1,000 on his site counter. Congratulations, Bill! You're doing great. You are becoming an important voice in the blogosphere. The word will spread. Keep it up.

Some people have feline companions. I have canine companions. Peg Kaplan has avian companions. Look at Mr Mollo! What a beautiful bird! Thanks for the show and tell, Peg.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is both loved and hated, both celebrated and excoriated, both supported and opposed. It might be said that those who love PETA do so because they accept its ends, while those who hate it do so because they reject its ends. PETA has a stake in promoting this view, for it diverts attention from the organization's strategies and tactics.

I think the view being promoted is mistaken. There are many people who accept PETA's ends but reject its means. There are many people who genuinely care about animals and would gladly throw their support behind a reputable organization, but who believe that PETA adopts reprehensible and counterproductive tactics. How do I know this? I teach. I receive letters. I read newspapers. I watch television. I've had over twenty years of experience with this issue. I know whereof I speak.

Can we agree that it's wrong to degrade women (or any other group) in order to promote a goal? If so, then we can ask whether PETA's campaigns degrade women. I believe they do. Can we agree that rational persuasion is superior to manipulation? If so, then we can ask whether PETA prefers the latter to the former. I believe it does. Can we agree that commercialization is bad? If so, then we can ask whether PETA is commercialized. I believe it is. Can we agree that a serious organization, devoted to long-lasting social change, should not rely on celebrity? If so, then we can ask whether PETA relies on celebrity. I believe it does.

I'm trying to reach agreement on moral principles so that we can discuss facts. Sometimes I get the feeling that, to PETA, the end justifies the means. If manipulation works better than rational persuasion, then by all means manipulate! If tactic A gets more attention than tactic B, thus getting PETA into the news, then tactic A is preferable to B. If degrading women or cozying up to powerful commercial interests helps animals, then it must be done.

I despise this sort of result-oriented thinking. It appalls me. Animals do not benefit, in the long run, from anything but rational persuasion. It particularly galls me to find philosophers supporting PETA. No self-respecting philosopher would manipulate an audience, however important the end. Philosophers are concerned with knowledge, not mere belief. Their objective isn't to change people's beliefs but to provide good grounds for belief. This rules out appeals to emotion, for example. It rules out buckets of blood, paint-throwing, rudeness, and other vile, self-defeating tactics. PETA turns off more people than it recruits. I'm convinced of it. Is this good for animals? With friends like PETA, animals don't need enemies.

Philosophers must remain independent. They must avoid affiliation, association, and membership. Philosophers (think Socrates) are devoted single-mindedly to the acquisition of knowledge, which means, among other things, having rational grounds for belief. Nothing must interfere with this objective. The philosopher, as such, would rather not change beliefs at all than change them through disreputable means. Philosophers are deontologists, not consequentialists. Philosophical argumentation is constrained, not free.

I call upon my philosophical friends (they know who they are) to sever ties with PETA. Immediately. Regain your lost independence and self-respect. Come home to philosophy. Come back to what attracted you to philosophy in the first place: its integrity, its honesty, and its methodological purity. You can't be both a philosopher and a shill. You can try to be both, but you can't succeed at it.

Until I got to Texas in 1988, I never said "Yeehaa!" Now I say it every now and then, usually while riding my bike. I can't find an entry for "Yeehaa" in any of my dictionaries. It's an exclamation. It's boisterous. It means something like "Yeah!" or "Yowzer!" I might say it, for example, while roaring down the main street of a Texas town, hoping locals will absorb some of my energy and excitement (or at least notice me and wonder about my mental condition). I've said it while flying down a hill at forty miles an hour. You don't say "Yeehaa"; you scream it. It's visceral. Guttural. It's designed to frighten the dead.

Some people pronounce the word "Yeehaw." There's a television advertisement for a local window company in which the salesperson says "Yeehaw!" before breaking a pane of glass with a crowbar. It seems inauthentic to me. I probably hear "Yeehaa" two or three times as often as "Yeehaw."

I like the "y" words. I say "Yikes," "Yowzer," "Yeehaa," and "Yastrzemski" all the time. Okay, I made that last one up. I'm in a baseball frame of mind this evening. My adopted Texas Rangers and my home-state Detroit Tigers just started their televised game. All is well in the world. Yeeeeeeehaa!

It has become fashionable—indeed, all but obligatory—to complain about Major League Baseball's hierarchical salary structure. Teams such as the New York Yankees and Atlanta Braves spend significantly more in player salaries than do teams such as the Florida Marlins and Minnesota Twins. It is said that this hurts the game. Some teams are "out of it" before the season begins. Titles should be won on the field, not purchased by the likes of George Steinbrenner.

But having a high-salaried team is neither necessary nor sufficient for winning a World Series title. The Yankees haven't won a World Series since 2000, even though they spent more money than any other team during each of the past three seasons. The most recent winners—the Arizona Diamondbacks in 2001, the Anaheim Angels in 2002, and the Florida Marlins in 2003—were not among the biggest spenders. Florida was among the smallest.

This isn't to suggest that money plays no role in how things turn out. Of course it does. There's probably a correlation, historically, between how much a team spends on salaries and how it fares on the field. I, however, think this is good for the game, not bad. For one thing, it creates underdogs. Everyone outside of New York wants the big, bad Yankees to fall on their faces, and recently they have done so. This is delightful. It's great to know that a team of young, comparatively underpaid players can topple giants. It's great to see the presumption rebutted, the rule excepted, the norm transgressed.

Imposing a salary cap, as the National Football League has done, will damage the game of baseball. It will turn the hated Yankees into just another team. America needs both Goliaths and Davids. It's part of the morality play that is baseball.

In acting loyally, the self acts in harmony with its personal history. One recognizes who one is. Actions of standing by one's friends, family, nation, or people reveal that identity. The self sees in its action precisely what history requires it to do.

(George P. Fletcher, Loyalty: An Essay on the Morality of Relationships [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], 25)

Here is another take on the bias of The New York Times. Don't take my word or John Podhoretz's word for it; read the stories and editorial opinions of the Times yourself. You'll see what we mean. What's frightening is that there isn't much difference between the stories and the editorial opinions. Both are relentlessly anti-American. Both exhibit hatred of President Bush and of ordinary hard-working, God-fearing, patriotic Americans.

Hi,

I recently began reading your blog and really enjoy it. After reading some of your opinions, I wondered if you have ever listened to or read Neal Boortz. You share a lot of the same ideas and beliefs as he does. Coincidentally, so do I. Maybe that's why I enjoy your blogs so much. I have a blog at http://justalkin.blogspot.com.

I'm just starting it, and it's not nearly as good as yours. It's mostly just random thoughts at the moment, but you never know where it might end up.

Good luck and keep up the good posting.

To the Editor:

"The President and Women" (editorial, May 9) attributes thoughts to me that I do not believe.

The Americans who marched in Washington recently to advocate pro-choice policies have every right to do so, just as I have the right to advocate my pro-life position.

My remarks on CNN were an effort to find common ground on this divisive issue.

I said, and believe, that after Sept. 11 we have been reminded of the precious nature of human life, especially as Americans of all political philosophies and beliefs fight a common enemy in the terror network that assaults the founding conviction of our country, that all individuals were endowed by our Creator with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

I suggested that surely reasonable people on both sides of the abortion issue, including a number of my pro-choice friends who also work for President Bush, could agree that we should work to reduce the number of abortions in America through policies like promoting adoption.

KAREN HUGHES
Austin, Tex., May 10, 2004

Eloquence, n. The art of orally persuading fools that white is the color that it appears to be. It includes the gift of making any color appear white.

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

I've seen Kiss in concert seven times. I own most of the band's albums. Now I have an additional reason to appreciate the band. Its bass guitarist, Gene Simmons, has a brain. Most celebrities, alas, do not. See here. (Thanks to Dan Gifford for the link.)

Did you read the New York Times editorial I posted? (See immediately below.) What's the point of describing Nicholas Berg as "an adventurous and naïve young man"? Why the emphasis on his "defiance" of danger? Is the Times suggesting that he is responsible for his own death? I don't know why else this would have been included in an editorial opinion, especially one as short as this.

Would the Times make a similar suggestion about a young woman who, knowing of the dangerousness of a particular part of town, went there alone, at night, to do business, only to be raped and murdered? You know the answer to this question. The Times is trying to make it seem as though Nicholas Berg deserved to die. He shouldn't have been where he was, doing what he was, with the motives he had. That he was there on "business" makes him seem rapacious as well as naïve.

The Times seems discomfited by the attention being paid to Berg's death. It diverts attention from what the Times considers the real story, which is the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers. But why is one of these stories more important than the other? Oops! I forgot. One story undermines the war effort; the other bolsters it. The Times has been an implacable opponent of the war.

The editors of the Times aren't like you and me. They don't think the way you and I do. They don't have the values we (or most Americans) have. They are aliens in our midst. Beware.

Nicholas Berg's Death

It's easy to say he should not have been in Iraq, but Nicholas Berg was a type familiar to all danger zones: an adventurous and naïve young man who was perhaps keen to do a bit of business, but keener yet to test himself; old enough to understand the danger, but young enough to defy it. It is impossible not to feel grief, and horror, at his terrible end.

The claim of this young American's murderers that they were retaliating for the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is a cruel ruse. They killed him out of the same madness that drove their comrades in Al Qaeda to slaughter thousands on Sept. 11, 2001. But this manipulative attempt to establish a moral equivalence between the gruesome execution of Mr. Berg and the torture of Iraqi prisoners is now being mimicked by some hard-core supporters of the American war in Iraq. They are cynically trying to use the images of Mr. Berg to wipe away the images of Abu Ghraib, turning the abhorrence for the murderers into an excuse for demonizing Arabs and Muslims, or for sanctioning their torture.

Mr. Berg's parents have legitimate questions for the United States government about how he came to be in Iraqi police custody immediately before his kidnapping, what happened to him there and what knowledge American officials had about his situation. The occupation authority needs to stop passing off those questions to the Iraqi police force, which does not exist other than as an agent of American power. The Berg family deserves answers so they can grieve for their son's death in peace.

A cliché, according to the Oxford American Dictionary and Language Guide (1999), is "a hackneyed phrase or opinion." That won't tell you much unless you know what "hackneyed" means. A phrase is hackneyed when it is "made commonplace or trite by overuse." "Trite" means "hackneyed; worn out by constant repetition." So a cliché is a phrase (or opinion) that is worn out by overuse or constant repetition.

Here is today's cliché: "hindsight is twenty-twenty." You've heard it a lot, haven't you? It's worn out, isn't it? The idea, I suppose, is that events that have already occurred are clear, whereas those that have not already occurred are not clear. When we look back, temporally, we see what happened. When we look forward, we don't know what will happen.

Things aren't as stark as all this. We often have a clear idea of what will happen if we act one way rather than another, and sometimes we have no clear idea of what in fact happened. Is it clear what caused the Civil War? Is it clear who killed President John F. Kennedy? If things were always clear, we would not need historians, whose job it is to make sense of the past. If things were always clear, historians would never disagree, which of course they do.

Sometimes the expression "hindsight is twenty-twenty" is meant to stifle criticism. For example, suppose a baseball manager walks the other team's star player (think Barry Bonds) to load the bases in the ninth inning of a tie game. It's a risky move, since a walk will end the game. Suppose the next batter walks, ending the game. If someone criticizes the manager, it might be said in response that "hindsight is twenty-twenty." We know, now, what happened; but we didn't know at the time what would happen.

This is confused. We criticize decisions, not outcomes. The manager's decision to walk the star player is independent of what actually happens. If the move backfires, i.e., if the pitcher walks in the winning run, it doesn't make the decision wrong; and if it works out, i.e., if the pitcher retires the batter, it doesn't make it right. Lazy sportswriters and fans ignore this. They shouldn't. Hindsight may tell us what happened, but it doesn't mean that decisions are beyond criticism.

Like Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), I would not want to live in a world without dogs. With all due respect to my fellow humans, dogs are superior beings. We should strive not for godliness, but for dogliness. Here are some letters written by dogs to God. (Thanks to Jean Robart for the link.)

Hi Keith,

Really enjoy your blog. Bought a couple of the books you recommended and am trying to claw my way through the infinite varieties and flavors of utilitarianism. I CAN say that I now see the structures of arguments rather than simply the points being made. Thank you.

I'm writing today to let you know of a serious situation with the Boston Globe. They published a picture showing a picture of US soldiers apparently gang-raping Iraqi women. Well, the rape picture was a phony from a US-based porno site and has since been taken down. There is a mea culpa (not for the fakery but rather because the sex act could be seen) on the Globe's website dated 5/13/04. Additionally, worldnetdaily has the story which is still developing.

So what? A porno picture that is upsetting some soccer moms in Boston? Not quite. The Arab world is up in arms over these pictures, coming as they do on the heels of the Abu Ghraib ones. The US has demanded that Arab media outlets publish retractions regarding this story but few, if any, have done so. The consequences to our troops in the region can be imagined.

What I'm particularly interested in is the way this story got into the Globe in the first place. It seems that some Arab radical took this story (and pictures) and pumped it to a couple of black radical activists in Boston. One, Chuck Taylor, is a city councilman and the other, Sadiki Kambon, seems to be some sort of Al Sharpton clone. They are both associated with various lefty organizations (e.g., ANSWER) from way back when. Now how could a "dynamic duo" like these two have a direct line into the Globe such that a story of such consequence would not be checked prior to publication? It was 10-second google to find the porn site and discredit the pictures.

Where exactly is this country going and how the hell did we ever get on this road? Are there really people that hate this country so much they would suspend belief in their neighbors and friends and bring to the public "evidence" that our soldiers are gang-banging Iraqi women? In a time of war? I'm shocked and I'm angry but most of all I'm hurting. I feel like a fool for doing my job, raising my family, paying my taxes while all the time there've been these people burrowing into my world intent on destroying it. That hurts.

Just thought you should know. Best of luck and keep on blogging.

Detroit, Michigan

Pain, n. An uncomfortable frame of mind that may have a physical basis in something that is being done to the body, or may be purely mental, caused by the good fortune of another.

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

I get lots of e-mail, for which I'm grateful. Unfortunately, I can't reply to all or even most of it. If I did, I wouldn't get anything else done, including posting items on my blogs! Right now I have 138 messages in my inbox, many of them in response to my penultimate Tech Central Station column, "Explaining Liberal Anger." My plan is to copy these column-related letters to a Word document, clean it up, and upload it. Then I'll provide a link to it on this blog. The letters, as you'll see, are heartwarming. I've already posted the handful of negative letters I received. Ninety-five percent of the mail I received about the column was favorable.

Which brings me to the second letter-related item. I've decided to follow Andrew Sullivan's lead in omitting names from the letters I publish. See here. There's no reason to post names. Recently, two people who sent insulting e-mail to me complained (gallingly) that I posted their letters without permission. If I leave the names off, nobody can complain. Does that sound like a sound policy? Back to grading.

To the Editor:

Re "An A for Effort to Restore Meaning to the Grade" (Public Lives, May 6): I have been a professor of architecture at Pratt Institute for more than 30 years. While architecture students' portfolios are more important than their grades, my colleagues on the Academic Senate often complain about grade inflation.

Every year, I make a simple proposal: An A should be defined as "truly outstanding," and truly outstanding should mean that we pin up the work and invite our colleagues to come and see it. If our colleagues say "You asked me to come all the way out to Brooklyn to see this?," that means the work should not have gotten an A. (The process would most obviously apply to graphic projects, but written papers could also be pinned up.)

Each year my colleagues on the Senate pause, look at me, and then go back to complaining about grade inflation.

JOHN LOBELL
New York, May 6, 2004

It may not be fair, but presidents get credit for good economies and blame for bad ones, even if they're not responsible. This is the political equivalent of strict liability in the law. Suppose your goal is to defeat a president. Knowing that we have a strict-liability system, you will do everything you can to make the economy seem bad. This turns out to be remarkably easy to do, especially for the unscrupulous.

First, there are many economic indicators: inflation, unemployment, interest rates, budget deficits, trade deficits, &c. Pick the one that's doing least well. Harp on it. Make it seem the most important indicator. Ignore or downgrade the others.

Second, no indicator is ever perfect. We have never had, and never will have, zero unemployment, for example. So you can always plausibly say that things could be better, the implication being that, without the current president, things would be better.

Third, there are different methods of measuring things like unemployment and different interpretations of raw unemployment data. You can pick the measurement or interpretation that serves your purposes.

If you've been reading Paul Krugman's New York Times columns, as I have, you know that he plays this dishonest game. His objective, which is transparent, is to defeat President Bush. Nothing else matters, not even intellectual honesty. He harps on the worst-performing economic indicators; he emphasizes how far things are from perfection rather than how much worse things could be (in other words, he's maximally pessimistic); and he cherry-picks his data sources and interpretations.

Economics is politics masquerading as science. Paul Krugman trades on public respect for scientists, but he's as ruthless a political operative as I've seen. Don't trust him. If you read his columns at all, go immediately thereafter to Donald Luskin's site (see here) for the necessary corrective.

The words "liberty" and "liberalism" have a common root, reflecting the commitment of the original or classical liberals to a free society. Over the last century, the latter term has come to represent a political position that is willing to sacrifice liberty in the economic realm for the sake of equality and/or collective welfare. As a consequence, those who wish to reaffirm the classical version of liberalism—those who advocate liberty in economic as well as personal and intellectual matters—have invented a new word from the old root; they call themselves libertarians. Both in doctrine and in etymology, then, partisans of this view define themselves by their allegiance to liberty. Yet they spend most of their day-to-day polemical energies defending property rights and the economic system of laissez-faire capitalism that is based upon such rights. Evidently there is a strong link between liberty and property at work here.

(David Kelley, "Life, Liberty, and Property," in Human Rights, ed. Ellen Frankel Paul, Jeffrey Paul, and Fred D. Miller, Jr. [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986 (1984)], 108-18, at 108)

Professor Burgess-Jackson:

It's nice to see that someone takes pains to point out the more agreeable aspects of life (unlike, say, The New York Times in particular, the mainstream media in general). So, though I agree with the more positive spirit of your post, I find the content of #1 wanting. In the spirit of Dennis Miller, I don't mean to go off on a rant here, but. . . . In fact, I find the United States Postal Service both despicable and disgusting. Casting aside the broad scope of their utter unreliability, think for a moment on the God-awful incompetence of most of their individual employees. Don't these guys get Columbus Day off? I mean, come on. COLUMBUS DAY??? And the jingo: "through rain or sleet or snow" or what-the-hell ever? Give me a break. These guys might see "rain or sleet or snow" on the Weather Channel, and that's about it—but WORK in it? Come on. What do you have to do to become a postal worker anyway? Herd one hundred fools into a room, give them an exam equivalent to the FLE, and then hire all those who fail??? Then too, how many times have you, in the busiest portion of the day, stood in line at the Post Office behind ten or twelve other miserable souls who, like you, wonder why only one of six windows is functioning? Furthermore, there is the private-sector aspect that just bugs the utter hell out of me (and meets, I think, your mention of the thirty-seven cent stamp head-on). Did you realize that UPS and Airborne Express (among others) cannot charge below a certain amount to ship a letter/package because they are not allowed to undercut the USPS? So much for competition.

Whew! That felt nice. Take care, and keep up the good work!

If you're religious (or even if you're not), please visit this site and read what it says. Think about the spirit as well as the letter of whatever religious text you deem authoritative. Ask yourself whether you're doing right by your fellow creatures in your god's eyes.

See here for my new source of free-range eggs.

This weekly feature, which I hereby inaugurate, is designed to offset the negativity (peevishness) of "Peeves" (see here for the latest peeve). Just as there are things that annoy me, there are things that please me. It would be imbalanced to write about the former without writing about the latter. I strive for balance in my life.

Do you complain about postage rates? I don't. I have always thought it a bargain—maybe the best bargain there is—to be able to mail something across the country for thirty-seven cents or less. (I remember five-cent stamps!) If you've studied history, as I have, you know how unreliable mail service was—and how long it took to get a letter to someone. History provides context. It's mind-boggling to me how efficient the United States Postal Service is. I can put a letter in my mailbox in Fort Worth, Texas, on Monday morning and get it into my mother's hands in rural Michigan by Thursday morning.

Many people complain about postage rates. It's a common refrain, one I've heard for years. I don't get it. What's their standard? How much is acceptable? A quarter? A dime? Should it be free? (There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.) Thirty-seven cents is nothing! Please keep things in perspective.

Ally Eskin says here what no man could say without being labeled (by feminists) a misogynist. Feminists can't call Ally a misogynist (can a woman hate herself?), but they can and will call her a traitor to her sex. Note the implication: that all women think alike. Ally proves that feminists don't speak for all women. Thank you, Ally. I hope there are many more women like you and that they begin to speak out. Feminism has done a great deal of harm to women (some of which I've catalogued in this blog), not least of which is making them feel like victims. This is ironic, of course, for feminism claims to empower women. Ha! It turns them into whiny, dependent, vulnerable children. In my opinion, legally available abortion has given men more, not less, power over women. Think about it. Think like an economist.

On 14 May 1804, two hundred years ago this Friday, the Corps of Discovery, headed by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, pushed off from Camp Dubois on the east side of the Mississippi River. It would be two years and four months before the Corps, minus one man (Charles Floyd), would return to St Louis, by which time many Americans had given them up for dead. I'll be reading the journals of Lewis and Clark in real time for the third time. If you'd like to join me, acquire the journals as soon as possible. See here or here for the paperback edition, which is cheaper than the cloth version. Here, to pique your curiosity, is a story about the expedition from yesterday's Wall Street Journal.

Incidentally, I'll be teaching a course on Lewis and Clark this fall. See here for the publicity flier. By the time the course begins in late August, the Corps of Discovery will be well up the Missouri River. By the time it ends, in early December, the Corps will be settled in for the winter at Fort Mandan (near present-day Bismarck, North Dakota).

Paul Krugman began yesterday's New York Times column with this sentence: "Didn't you know, in your gut, that something like Abu Ghraib would eventually come to light?" What he meant, of course, is "Didn't you hope, in your gut, that something like Abu Ghraib would eventually come to light?" To Krugman, everything bad that happens is President Bush's fault, and nothing good that happens is President Bush's doing. Princeton University must be very proud of its two Bush-hating "scholars," Paul Krugman and Peter Singer. James Madison, who attended Princeton (see here), is rolling over in his grave.

Pig, n. An animal (Porcus omnivorus) closely allied to the human race by the splendor and vivacity of its appetite, which, however, is inferior in scope, for it sticks at pig.

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

It's been almost five years since Peter Singer, a native Australian, began teaching at Princeton University. He is a polarizing figure in my discipline (philosophy). Here is a story about the controversy surrounding Singer's appointment at the staid Ivy League school. Here is a follow-up essay by Jeff Sharlet in the same publication. Here is the reader feedback. Enjoy! By the way, Singer's new book examines the ethics of President Bush. See here. I have not read the book, so I cannot comment on it one way or the other. I suspect I will not like it. While I share Singer's Darwinism, I reject his leftist values. See here.

To the Editor:

Re "The President and Women" (editorial, May 9):

To shrink national women's issues to a morning-after pill or abortion rights offends many women.

George W. Bush knows what women want, starting with his No Child Left Behind program. Move on to lower taxes for families to spend and save money as they see fit. Women want to improve life, liberty and equality for themselves and the families they love.

Professional women are no less professional. I don't want Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, distracted from the war on terror to secure foreign women's reproductive rights. And I'm not offended that Karen Hughes, the president's adviser, said that particularly after 9/11, Americans value every single life.

America's strong, capable, thoughtful adult women are insulted by notions that our political persuasions are monolithic.

President Bush had the temerity to place women in influential government positions not to advance special interests but because they are "the best man for the job." Enough of this morning-after business.

JULIE FAIRCHILD
Dallas, May 11, 2004

To the Editor:

It baffles me how "In Abuse, a Portrayal of Ill-Prepared, Overwhelmed G.I.'s" (front page, May 9) seems to suggest that the prisoner abuse stemmed from a lack of training and leadership. Do we really need to be taught not to commit such atrocities?

As an American, I'm offended at the suggestion and quite honestly find it preposterous that without some particular military training or supervision my fellow citizens lack the moral intuition not to strip prisoners and pile them on each other for a good laugh.

There is undoubtedly a need to find an explanation for these crimes, but to attribute them to overburdened and inexperienced G.I.'s is ludicrous and rich fodder for an ever-increasing hatred of America in the Arab world.

MOHAMMED SHAHEEN
Cambridge, Mass., May 9, 2004

My baseball friends may laugh at this, but I think Roger Clemens will win thirty games this year. With last night's victory, he's 7-0. His team, the Houston Astros, is flying high with a 21-11 record. At this pace, Clemens will win 35.4 games (okay, thirty-five). Why is thirty victories achievable? First, Clemens plays for a team with a superb offense, so he'll get lots of run support. Second, he's rarely hurt. He'll start every fifth day all season. Third, he's gritty. What do you expect? Like Nolan Ryan and Lance Armstrong, he's a Texan. This state produces men, not wimps.

In the ideal logotopia, every person would possess his own library and add at least weekly if not daily to it. The walls of each home would seem made of books; wherever one looked one would only see spines; because every real book (as opposed to dictionaries, almanacs, and other compilations) is a mind, an imagination, a consciousness. Together they compose a civilization, or even several.

(William H. Gass, "In Defense of the Book: On the Enduring Pleasures of Paper, Type, Page, and Ink," Harper's Magazine 299 [November 1999]: 45-51, at 47)

I'm speechless. This essay by Terrence O. Moore gets to the heart of our difficulties. It may be the best thing I've ever read, and believe me, I've read some good stuff.

Huckleberry died five years ago today. See here.

Ally Eskin's blog (Who Moved My Truth?) is catching on. She just started, but already has 285 site visitors. You're doing great, Ally! Your posts are thoughtful and interesting. Remember: You cannot post too many dog photographs.

Congratulations to Steve Headley over at Texas Conservative for reaching the 4,000 mark in blog visitors. Here is Steve's take on that benchmark. Steve took immediately to blogging, and is very good at it. I'm not the least bit surprised by his already large daily readership. In the end, it's quality that brings readers back. Keep it up, Steve. Yours is becoming an important voice in the blogosphere.

Peg Kaplan over at what if? has a sweet tribute to Bill Keezer, who blogs at Bill's Comments. See here. I share Peg's enthusiasm for Bill's blog. I'm proud to have been of service to him in getting it started. Keep it up, Bill. You too, Peg. Bill is rapidly approaching 1,000 site visits.

Dr John J. Ray has his usual eclectic collection of posts today at Dissecting Leftism. See here. If you're not reading John's blog every day, you're out of the loop. For those who don't know the story, I put out a call for help shortly after starting this blog in early November 2003. John, who somehow found my blog, offered to help me, and did so at some inconvenience to himself. See here. This act of generosity from a stranger did wonders for my faith in humanity. Thanks, John. I will always be indebted. By the way, I bought a bottle of Vegemite today. I've yet to try it, but I will soon. I also bought a bottle of Marmite, the British variation on the Australian theme. I have a feeling I'll like Vegemite. Report to come.

Freedom, n. Exemption from the stress of authority in a beggarly half dozen of restraint's infinite multitude of methods. A political condition that every nation supposes itself to enjoy in virtual monopoly. Liberty. The distinction between freedom and liberty is not accurately known; naturalists have never been able to find a living specimen of either.

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

William J. Bennett has a Ph.D. degree in philosophy from The University of Texas at Austin and a J.D. degree from Harvard Law School. He is smarter than ninety-five percent of his critics. Some of them aren't smart enough to realize it. Here is Dr Bennett's diagnosis of the sickly Democrat Party.

The following is taken from the Institute's website:

The mission of the Claremont Institute is to restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life.

The Claremont Institute finds the answers to America's problems in the principles on which our nation was founded. These principles are expressed most eloquently in the Declaration of Independence, which proclaims that "all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. . . ."

To recover the Founding principles in our political life means recovering a limited and accountable government that respects private property, promotes stable family life and maintains a strong defense.

The Institute's work is only beginning. Today, our state and federal governments spend vast and increasing sums of public money for less and less good. The public sector continues to grow at the expense of the private. Regulations intrude into every corner of our lives. Schools no longer perform. Police and courts no longer protect. Good businesses are being driven to extinction by excessive and discriminatory controls, and as a result good jobs continue to disappear. Dependence grows and opportunity wanes with each passing year.

The Claremont Institute believes that informed citizens can and will make the right choices for America's future. Through its books, policy briefings, conferences and seminars, and now through the new electronic media of the World Wide Web, the Institute engages Americans in an informed discussion of the principles and policies necessary to rebuild our civic institutions.

Founded in 1979, the Claremont Institute's work is national in scope, but gives special emphasis to the problems of our country's largest state, where the Institute is based. Institute studies like the pioneering 1988 book, The Imperial Congress (co-published with the Heritage Foundation), innovative policy proposals such as our 1995 "Contract with California," our ongoing work on the cultural attacks on the American family, and our decade-long involvement in the critical debates over environmental regulations and property rights law—all have earned the Institute a reputation for sound scholarship and diligence in the service of constitutional government.

America's Founders endowed our Republic with sound principles and a framework for governing that is unmatched in the history of mankind. The prosperity and freedom of America can only be made secure if they are guided by a return to these basic principles as our country enters the 21st Century.

I put a permanent link to this website on the left side of this blog.

[T]he theory of 'ideal utilitarianism', if I may for brevity refer so to the theory of Professor [G. E.] Moore, seems to simplify unduly our relations to our fellows. It says, in effect, that the only morally significant relation in which my neighbours stand to me is that of being possible beneficiaries by my action. They do stand in this relation to me, and this relation is morally significant. But they may also stand to me in the relation of promisee to promiser, of creditor to debtor, of wife to husband, of child to parent, of friend to friend, of fellow countryman to fellow countryman, and the like; and each of these relations is the foundation of a prima facie duty, which is more or less incumbent on me according to the circumstances of the case. When I am in a situation, as perhaps I always am, in which more than one of these prima facie duties is incumbent on me, what I have to do is to study the situation as fully as I can until I form the considered opinion (it is never more) that in the circumstances one of them is more incumbent than any other; then I am bound to think that to do this prima facie duty is my duty sans phrase in the situation.

(W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good [Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1988 (1930)], 19 [footnote omitted; italics in original])

The first recipient of the annual Joel Feinberg Award for the Outstanding UTA Philosophy Major is Chad N. Kidd. The department thinks very highly of Chad and expects great things from him. Congratulations, Chad! Keep us apprised of your progress through the academic ranks.

I enjoy Roger Scruton myself (although I'm not quite the communitarian Scruton is), but I'm surprised by your high admiration considering your vegetarian convictions. As I recall, you had some harsh words for intelligent, ethically minded folks who persist in eating flesh. I actually thought about sending you this when I first saw it, but I didn't think you'd enjoy it. Here goes . . .

There was an excerpt of Scruton's new book in the Guardian last month. The title is "First, skin your squirrel . . ." and you can find it here.

There was also a review in the Independent here.

I'm still trying to figure out if he is the same Roger Scruton who advises drinking urine on special occasions [see here].

I hope you enjoy AnalPhilosopher as much as I do, or even half as much. Today I hit the 50,000 mark for visitors—in just over six months. Thank you! I've worked out a blogging routine that I'd like to share with you. Each day, I try to post the following:

• a quotation (usually, but not always, philosophical in nature)
• a definition from The Devil's Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce
• a letter from a reader ("From the Mailbag")
• a letter to the editor of The New York Times
• a piece of original philosophy
• a daily item

The daily item differs by the day of the week. I've settled on the following rotation:

• Sundays: Peeves
• Mondays: Confusions and Fallacies About Animals
• Tuesdays: Internet Resources for Philosophers
• Wednesdays: Gratifications (to counteract the Peeves!)
• Thursdays: Clichés and Mixed Metaphors
• Fridays: Texasisms
• Saturdays: Who Says Scholars Are Humorless?

Keep in mind that while I'm a philosopher, I'm not merely a philosopher. I post on many topics. You may have noticed a substantial political content. This is because I'm a political junkie. I majored in political science as an undergraduate, served as a delegate (for John Anderson) at the 1980 Michigan Republican State Convention, and work in social and political philosophy. I am thoroughly (some would say disgustingly) politicized.

This blog is my literary outlet (or one of them), so do not be surprised to see posts on all of my interests, from philosophy and law (I'm a lawyer) to music (I'm a headbanger) to sport (I run, bicycle, and play softball) to religion (I'm an atheist) to history (in which I have a Master's degree) to animals (I have two canine companions, eleven-year old Sophie and one-year old Shelbie). You will not always agree with (or like) what I write. But that just shows that we're different people. It would be frightening, not pleasing, if two people agreed on everything.

Today's link is to The Notebook for Contemporary Continental Philosophy.

To the Editor:

Re "2-for-1 Voting," by Bruce Ackerman (Op-Ed, May 5):

The purpose of voting for third-party candidates, like Ralph Nader or Ross Perot, is not to reward the two-party system with a slap on the wrist but to express disapproval for both mainstream candidates.

In an election that may be, once again, very close, a third-party candidate "spoiler" will force both parties to start taking the voters for the likes of Mr. Perot and Mr. Nader more seriously.

Americans should not be forced to choose between the lesser of two evils.

WILLIAM P. HOWELL JR.
Bronx, May 5, 2004

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who is considered by many contemporary philosophers as one of the greatest philosophers of all time, thought that all and only humans have dignity, by which he understood moral worth or value. This view can be challenged either by showing that some humans lack dignity or that some nonhumans have it. I believe some nonhumans have it. Indeed, I believe that all nonhuman animals have it.

Kant's mistake was in locating worth in agency. But this is not part of the concept of dignity; it's a normative position that one can consistently reject. Strictly speaking, dignity is the state of being worthy of honor or respect. It says nothing about the basis of worth or respect. A being can be worthy either in virtue of what it is or in virtue of what it does (or both). Thus, even if animals lack moral agency, they can still be worthy in virtue of what they are.

Let me give some examples. Have you been to a circus? What did you think when you saw bears wearing tutus and moving about on skates? Did you sense that it was undignified? Or what about mules who are trained to dive into pools? Or chimpanzees made to wear clothing and smoke cigars? Be honest. You felt sorry for the animals. You felt as though they were being degraded. Trust your feelings. They don't lie.

Dignity does not require possession of the concept of dignity, much less the ability to defend oneself from affronts to it. That is a crude (but common) mistake. Having one's dignity violated is not the same as being embarrassed or humiliated, so the fact (if it is a fact) that the aforementioned bears, mules, and chimpanzees are neither embarrassed nor humiliated is neither here nor there as far as having their dignity violated is concerned. Dignity is a condition, not a mental state or attitude.

Each animal species has a telos, or end. It has characteristic ways of behaving and feeling in response to environmental stimuli. When we take wild animals out of their natural habitats and train them to engage in unnatural behaviors for human amusement, we rob them of their dignity. This is no more acceptable in the case of animals than it is in the case of humans.

If you value dignity, you will boycott rodeos, circuses, bullfights, and zoos, all of which degrade and violate the animals they use and display. If you wouldn't want your dignity violated, don't violate the dignity of others, including our animal brethren.

Riding on the lucky wheel of 17
I think I'm gonna live to be 103
Feel like a wild card—what you say
A slice of the night gonna come my way

Walking through the city
I'm the king of surprise
My midnight champagne's ready on ice
It's Saturday night, I got nerves of steel
I can roll all night on a roulette wheel

Let the night roll on
I'm looking for hell
Let the night roll on
I'm makin' a kill
It's Saturday night, I've waited so long
Let the night roll on

Playing along with the rest of the world
Saxophone women . . . satisfied girls
I'm a wound-up string on a violin
The future's gonna take me where I've never been
I could be naked Sunday, nothing to wear
I wouldn't know it, I wouldn't care
It's Saturday night, I got nerves of steel
I can roll all night, I'm a roulette wheel

Dear Keith,

My husband is a Junior, and so, to uncomplicate things at home, he was called by his middle name, "Howard." But that name seemed too formal for the rough-and-tumble, extroverted boy. His family and friends soon nicknamed him "Howdy."

Everybody liked Howdy. He was a popular kid and excellent at school and sports. For college, he decided to follow in his father's footsteps and enrolled at his father's alma mater, Texas A&M. In August 1971 when he strolled the College Station campus for the very first time, he was amazed at the vast number of people who already knew him by name and called out to him. Said his ego was taller than his 6-4 frame, until it finally dawned on him a day later.

Enjoyed your Aggie reminiscences and word research on "howdy"! [See here.]

Sincerely,
Charlotte Muhl

Victor Davis Hanson is a national treasure. See here for his latest gem. (Thanks to James Taranto of Best of the Web Today for the link.)

One of my readers, Robert Light, drew my attention to a debate between Harry V. Jaffa and Harvey Mansfield. See here for an essay (by Thomas G. West) about that debate. Thanks, Robert.

We choose, but God chooses which choices to give us. And it is good that our bad choices and good choices should not form our characters with instantaneous effect. We need to show the resoluteness of our commitment over a short period. For a year or two we can change our minds and postpone any irrevocable choice. But sooner or later, whether we like it or not, our refusal to choose the good begins to have a permanent effect on our nature. Our freedom to choose between good and bad has a heavy cost. We may choose the bad, and cause much suffering to our fellow men, and in other ways also wrong them and our Creator. The longer the period of time for which God allows us this kind of freedom, the heavier the suffering to our fellow men may be. There are limits to God's right to allow others to suffer for the sake of our having this kind of freedom. Further, if God allowed us always to be able to postpone any irrevocable formation of character he would be putting in our way a very strong temptation never to face up to things, to trivialize our lives and forever to waste God's gift, and to avoid ever making ourselves worthy to enjoy Heaven. It is good that God should allow us to be tempted over a brief period to do evil, for that gives us a real choice. But to allow us to be subjected forever to a temptation to avoid any ultimate commitment would make it very difficult for us ever to make that commitment; and a good God might well avoid putting us in that position. He will do this by giving us a limited period of earthly life in which by our actions we can choose our character; he will leave us free to choose, and he will give to each with his resulting character the kind of life appropriate to such a character. What more could we want?

(Richard Swinburne, Responsibility and Atonement [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989], 200)

Like anything else, blogs vary in quality. I read a handful of blogs each day. There is no time for any more. Here is a blog that I think highly of and enjoy very much. Check it out. It may change your opinion of lawyers.

By the way, one of the lawyer-bloggers at Advisory Opinion, Old Benjamin, just sent a link to this blog by a Chicago radio host, Milt Rosenberg. Apparently, Rosenberg interviewed British philosopher Roger Scruton, one of my philosophical heroes. Click the link in Rosenberg's blog to listen to the interview. It appears that Scruton has a new book on the market, which I will need to acquire and read. I've said before that if I were stranded on an island, I would want the books of either R. M. Hare or Richard A. Posner. I would now add John Kekes and Roger Scruton to that short list.

If you love baseball, as any right-thinking person does, see here. I will argue in a future post that baseball and conservatism go hand in hand. It has to do with tradition, with respect for the past, and with pessimism. Stay tuned.

To the Editor:

You accuse the Walt Disney Company of cowardice and censorship because of its decision a year ago not to distribute Michael Moore's film "Fahrenheit 9/11" (editorial, May 6). In fact, the cowardly thing would have been to be intimidated into distributing the film. We did not block its distribution. There are many avenues for Mr. Moore to pursue to get his film distributed.

Your accusations of stifling free expression are misplaced. The First Amendment does not say that The New York Times must print every article presented to it or that the Walt Disney Company must distribute every movie. If a government entity had blocked Mr. Moore's film from being released, that would have violated the First Amendment, and we would have quickly signed up to join any protest.

In the case of "Fahrenheit 9/11," we chose a path that was right for the company and its stakeholders.

The creation of intellectual product rises and falls on similar judgments by creative people and executives across America. We would hope that The Times would recognize that the Walt Disney Company has the same right of freedom of expression that it is advocating for Mr. Moore.

MICHAEL D. EISNER
Chief Exec., Walt Disney Company
Burbank, Calif., May 7, 2004

Proof-reader, n. A malefactor who atones for making your writing nonsense by permitting the compositor to make it unintelligible.

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

Today's link is to Chinese Philosophy Page.

Are you trying to increase my blood pressure? Here is my response to Seebach's article [see here], if you are interested. I think I can say things, being a woman, that no man would get away with. We'll see. ;)

Ally

In his famous (some would say "infamous") essay on famine relief, Peter Singer observes that "What it is possible for a man to do and what he is likely to do are both . . . very greatly influenced by what people around him are doing and expecting him to do" (Peter Singer, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," Philosophy & Public Affairs 1 [spring 1972]: 229-43, at 237). (See here for an exposition and discussion of Singer's argument by yours truly.)

Singer is not a psychologist, and neither am I, but I think he's right about the role of expectations in our lives. We get from people what we expect of them. If we expect only a little, we get only a little. If we expect a lot, we get a lot. I learned this firsthand when I began clerking for a law firm during law school. One of the attorneys for whom I worked had four children, from college to grade-school age. In talking with them, I was surprised to learn that they had high aspirations. All four intended to become professionals, like their father.

This was not the case in my family. In fact, there was no expectation that I or any of my brothers would go to college. It was made clear to us that we would finish high school—anything less would be considered unacceptable, even disgraceful—but nobody ever suggested that we would be failures or disappointments if we didn't go to college. High school was expected; college was hoped for; graduate or professional school was, well, out of the question, a pipe dream.

This experience with my boss's children taught me an important lesson: that expectations matter. If parents have high expectations for their children, their children will meet them. Parents get what they expect. I was the only one of four brothers to go to college. One did not finish high school. You will not be surprised to learn that three of the four children of the attorney became professionals. (The fourth died, tragically, before getting a chance to join them; but there is every indication that he would have.)

Singer thinks that expectations affect our moral lives as well as our educational and occupational choices. Surely he's right about this. Why, then, do we refrain from condemning premature parenthood? Why do we tolerate impaired driving? Why are our educational standards so low? Are we so obsessed with being "nonjudgmental" or "politically correct" that we lower our standards to the point where there are no standards? I honestly don't see any standards or expectations with regard to childbearing. I see children having children. This is in nobody's interest: not the parent's, not the child's, and certainly not society's (which will end up subsidizing it).

I resent having to raise other people's children. I resent being responsible for other people's irresponsibility. Let each of us make a conscious effort to raise moral expectations. We may find, to our surprise, that we get what we expect.

My twenty-first Tech Central Station column, a 3,000-word treatise on the war in Iraq, just hit the newsstand (so to speak). See here. Ray Patnaude did his usual terrific job with the illustration. This one shows David Hume (1711-1776) in the foreground and Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) in the background. Thanks, Ray! And thanks to TCS's editor, Nick Schulz, for his usual sterling work. It is a pleasure to work with the two of you.

Linda Seebach of The Rocky Mountain News has written an interesting column about feminist Bush-bashing. See here. I agree with her wholeheartedly. I wonder what my female blogging friends Peg Kaplan and Ally Eskin think about the report Seebach discusses. Do the authors speak for you? If not, how does it feel having them presume to do so? By the way, I discovered Seebach's column by visiting RealClearPolitics, which is an excellent resource.

See here for a link to Veganism in a Nutshell.

What makes it difficult, in trying to make an overall assessment of President Clinton's character, to view him simply as a person in whom the elements are fearfully mixed, is his shamelessness, his evident lack of conscience, his self-absorption, and his apparent belief that the end justifies the means even when the end is the petty one of burnishing his historical reputation. These are deeper failings of character than sexual incontinence and a proclivity for lying.

(Richard A. Posner, An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999], 162 [footnote omitted])

To the Editor:

During the Korean War, I was drafted, at age 19, after two unhappy, unfocused years in college. I served my time in Europe, never near any active conflict.

My time in the service was an intense experience. I grew up fast, and I met guys from every corner of the country with every shade of skin color. We had a tight squad, always together, carousing in town or sleeping in snow on bivouac.

I have always thought that all young people should be obligated for a year or two of national service, not necessarily the Army. It was a life-changing two years for me.

MITCHELL B. JACOBS
New York, May 4, 2004

This woman raises her children the way my mother raised hers: by giving them structured freedom. There are two ways to mess up: not enough structure and not enough freedom.

My mother, Laura Belle Rowbotham, will be seventy years old on 18 September. She is still young and beautiful to me, and always will be. There came a time when I ceased being her inferior and became her equal. Her friend. I have no better friend. Thanks, Mom, for everything you did for me. My happiness is your doing. I'm not a parent, and may never be, so I don't know how hard it is to sacrifice for one's children. It can't be easy. You made many sacrifices for your sons, for which we are grateful. You never complained. You were always there when we needed you. I think I speak for Glenn, Mark, and Gary in saying that we wouldn't trade you for anyone else's mother. I love you, Mom. Happy Mother's Day!

It's common knowledge that people do dumb, disrespectful, and indecent things while driving. I believe I could teach an entire course in ethics by discussing only driving. It furnishes all the examples I need. I'm sure you're as annoyed as I am by those who pull out in front of you as you drive down a roadway. But there's a special case of this that burns my ass (pardon the French).

Why do people who pull up on the side of a roadway think that they can pull out as soon as they're ready, even if it inconveniences or endangers those who are approaching? I'll be driving along and notice someone pulled up in front of me. I'll accommodate the person by moving to the left. Invariably, just as I get there, the car pulls out, causing me to hit the brake. Did the person look? Did the person care?

Perhaps those who do this don't think they've really stopped. They haven't gotten out of the car, after all. They haven't shut the engine off. They may only have stopped to pick someone up or let someone off. Psychologically, it feels like a nonstop. But it's a stop! You're stopped! People are taking your stoppedness into account as they approach! Please, people, think before you act. There are lives at stake. If you come to a stop, on or off the roadway, you must wait for traffic to clear before pulling out.

Some of you may remember the exchange between Ally Eskin and Dr Leonard S. Carrier concerning the morality of war in Iraq. Ally, a mere undergraduate, held her own against the good doctor (in my opinion). I'm pleased to report that Ally has started a blog, Who Moved My Truth? Her posts to this point are superb, and the blog itself is aesthetically pleasing. Keep it up, Ally! I'll link to you from time to time to help you build a readership; and I'll put a permanent link on the left side of this blog. Maybe Dr Carrier will write to you, as he did me.

Addendum: If you visit Ally's blog, please click on "Photos" and look at her images of Scotland. What a beautiful country! The only two countries I've ever wanted to visit are Australia and Scotland.

Imbecility, n. A kind of divine inspiration, or sacred fire affecting censorious critics of this dictionary.

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

Today's link is to African Philosophy Resources.

An important anti-theistic consideration is summed up in the title of one of Hume's works, The Natural History of Religion. This phrase suggests that there is some adequate natural explanation, in terms which do not depend at all on even the approximate truth of the theistic doctrines, for the whole phenomenon of religious belief and practice. The explanation may be that religion satisfies widespread psychological human needs, or that it fulfils some social function. The availability of such an explanation would not in itself tend to show that the theistic doctrines are false, but it would undermine any presumption of their truth that might otherwise be founded on their widespread acceptance. In any field of inquiry we normally start by taking for granted what is almost universally believed, and revise or discard this only reluctantly and for strong reasons. But if we can show that a certain belief would be almost universally held, even if it were groundless, the issue is made far more open: there is no clear onus of proof on either side.

(J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and Against the Existence of God [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982], 7-8)

Curiosity, n. An objectionable quality of the female mind. The desire to know whether or not a woman is cursed with curiosity is one of the most active and insatiable passions of the masculine soul.

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

It pains me to say this, but truth compels it. Leftists will stop at nothing to defeat George W. Bush. They will misrepresent how things are; they will commit fallacies; they will act unjustly and unfairly; they will disrespect individuals and institutions; they will sully reputations; they will undermine the war effort and impugn the integrity of those prosecuting it, including soldiers; they will even shoot themselves in the foot.

Anything goes. Even decency and civility go out the window. I still haven't figured out why President Bush inspires such hatred. Every day I rack my brain to no avail. The hatred is raw, intense, and frightening. I keep coming back to this. Leftists have a vision of how the world should be and are insistent to the point of fanaticism on implementing it. They view the Bush administration as standing in their way—as thwarting their efforts to engineer society. For all their talk of tolerance and open-mindedness, they are dogmatic and tyrannical. They are totalitarians manqué.

Every right-minded person should fear leftists and do everything possible, within the confines of justice and decency, to frustrate their insidious designs. This is no time for the Right to be complacent. But we must not stoop to the level of those we oppose. We must not think that the end justifies the means. We must not turn adversaries into enemies. We are in the right. We have truth, justice, and common sense on our side. We must make our case, calmly and patiently, to the American people, for that is where the power resides.

Today's link is to Plato and His Dialogues.

Professional bicycling is the hardest sport in the world. The Tour de France is the hardest event in the sport, with the Giro d'Italia (Tour of Italy) second. The Giro began today. Here is the flamboyant sprinter Mario Cipollini during the prologue, which sorts riders out, timewise, for the first long stage. You can follow the Giro on cyclingnews.com as it wends its way around Italy for the next three weeks. If you have cable television, you can watch the stages live every weekday morning on the Outdoor Life Network (OLN). Out you go!

Addendum: I put a link to cyclingnews.com on the left side of this blog, so you can get to it easily.

Every day for at least a year, I have read the letters to the editor of The New York Times (online). I noticed long ago that almost all the letters reflect a liberal mentality. Sometimes there are five or more letters on the same topic, saying the same thing in different words. One day, curious, I wrote to the letters editor to complain. I was told that the letters published are a representative sample of those received. If this is true, then almost all the letters sent to the Times reflect a liberal mentality.

Let's think about this. Is there any reason why liberals would send more letters to the Times than conservatives? In other words, are liberals more likely to write? I don't know why they would. So most readers of the Times are liberal.

But why would most readers of the Times be liberal? It's a national newspaper. Could it be that the Times is biased in favor of liberalism and that this turns off conservatives? That's my hypothesis. The Times has alienated its conservative readers and now preaches to the choir. That's in nobody's interest: not the Times's, not liberals', not conservatives'. The newspaper I once thought of as the first draft of history; the newspaper I used in my undergraduate research on George Armstrong Custer's 1874 Black Hills Expedition; the newspaper I once loved, admired, and respected; has been reduced to a screeching political organ. Either those in charge at the Times don't know this or they don't care. Neither reflects well on them.

To the Editor:

Re "Donald Rumsfeld Should Go" (editorial, May 7):

The real target in the justified hue and cry over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners isn't Donald H. Rumsfeld now; it's George W. Bush in November.

The Democrats do not have any viable plan for how to pursue the war other than to say, It wouldn't have happened on our watch.

Perhaps this is true, but it is also possible that if were it not for President Bush, Saddam Hussein would still be in power, adding to an estimated 300,000 Iraqis murdered by his regime and tortured in his prisons, including Abu Ghraib.

JOHN DE PAUW
Arlington, Va., May 7, 2004
The writer was an Army Reserve adviser, U.S. Army War College.

R. Ross Viguet, "National Car Rental System, Inc. v. Computer Associates International, Inc.: A Hole in Software Copyright Protection You Can Drive a Rental Car Through," Arkansas Law Review 49 (1996): 93.

Muhammad Ali Khalidi, "Two Concepts of Concept," Mind and Language 10 (December 1995): 402.

Richard S. Markovits, "Monopoly and the Allocative Inefficiency of First-Best-Allocatively-Efficient Tort Law in Our Worse-Than-Second-Best World: The Whys and Some Therefores," Case Western Reserve Law Review 46 (1996): 313.

R. Amy Elman, "Triangles and Tribulations: The Politics of Nazi Symbols," Journal of Homosexuality 30 (1996): 1.

Bruce S. Stuart, "Swifties, Shifties, and That E-Biz Jazz: The Ethical Roles of Attorney/Literary Agents," Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal 18 (winter 1996): 245.

If you're interested in the concept of violence, see here. I will put a permanent link to this page on the left side of this blog.

I moved to Texas in mid-August 1988, when I was thirty-one years old. I was a visiting assistant professor at Texas A&M University (in College Station, Texas) during the 1988-1989 academic year, during which I completed my Ph.D. dissertation (on constitutional interpretation). That year, in addition to teaching, writing, and riding my bicycle, I secured a tenure-track position at The University of Texas at Arlington, where I've been ever since. I've been tenured since 1995. In eleven days, when I turn in grades for the spring semester, I'll complete my fifteenth year at UTA. The time has gone fast. With any luck, I'll have twenty more years to corrupt the youth of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.

Having grown up in Michigan, I experienced culture shock when moving to Tucson in August 1983 and again, more intensely, when moving to Texas five years later. I'll never forget my first day on the Texas A&M campus (which, by the way, is one of the largest in the United States [see here]). Every person who approached me said "Howdy." Not "Hi"; not "Hello"; not "How ya doin'?"; but "Howdy." I wasn't used to being greeted, much less greeted in this manner. It was strange. I don't recall hearing "Howdy" while growing up in Michigan. If I did, it was affected. But it's not affected in Texas. I hear it all the time. In fact, I've taken to saying it myself, both orally and in writing. Howdy!

No offense to my fellow Michiganders or to my adopted Arizonans, but Texans are friendlier than y'all. I have no idea why this is. Not that this explains it, but I believe the name "Texas" derives from "Tejas," which I understand is Spanish for "friend" or "friendly." Somebody correct me if I'm wrong. (I know French, but not, ironically, Spanish.) [Addendum: See here.]

Here is the Oxford English Dictionary (2d ed.) entry for "howdy":

how-do-ye, how-d'ye, howdy, phr. and n.

Forms: 6 howedye, how dee, 6-9 how-do-you, 7 how d'ee, 7-8 how-do-ye, 8 how(-)dee, 9 how de, 7- howdy, 8- how d'ye.

1. The phrase how do ye? how do you? (cf. next) = how are you? how fare you?: see do v. 19. Freq. in colloq. phr. to tell (a person) howdy.

1563-87 How do you? [see do v. 19]. c1828 T. O. Larkin in Calif. Hist. Soc. Q. (1937) XVI. 25 They (Southerners) often correct Yankees in their speaking... In those words they are right, but not in..how de for how do you do. 1837 A. Wetmore Gaz. Missouri 287 With a smile of welcome as she gave her hand, said, 'Howdy, Joseph.' 1850 J. Price Let. 17 Apr. in Mississippi Valley Hist. Rev. (1924) XI. 241 Tell Mother and the doctor Howdy. 1856 A. J. Hoole Let. 8 June in Kansas Hist. Q. (1934) III. 56 Give my love to..all enquiring friends; tell..all the negroes howdie for me. 1887 E. Eggleston Graysons i. (1888) 5 'Howdy, Rachel!' said Henry Miller..and 'Howdy! Howdy!' came from the two sisters, to which Rachel answered with a cordial 'Howdy! Come in!' 1917 J. M. Grider War Birds 20 Sept. (1927) 10 All the soldiers in the harbor came over to tell us howdy. 1928 L. North Parasites i. 30 Mr. Ashton greeted Henry a trifle more warmly... 'Howdy,' he said. 1973 J. Mann Only Security ii. 16, I ought really to go in and say howdy to her.

2. n. A message or salutation containing an inquiry as to the health of a person; = next 2.

1575 G. Harvey Letter-bk. (Camden) 90 To requite your gallonde of godbwyes, I regive you a pottle of howedyes. a1652 Brome Love-sick Court ii. i. Wks. 1873 II. 107 My great Lords Howdies are upon the entry. 1670 Cotton Espernon iii. x. 510 Had the Bishop sent to him by the way of a simple How d'ee only. 1697 Vanbrugh Relapse ii. Wks. (Rtldg.) 309/1 He has already sent how-do-ye's to all the town. 1743 Annesley Ejectm. Trial in Howell St. Trials (1813) XVII. 1166 He was sent..with messages and how-do-yous, to know how their child did. 1894 Daily News 28 Apr. 8/2 A missionary meeting..at Kingston when the coloured children sent their 'howdies',..which was short for 'how do you do', to the white children of Britain.

3. attrib. or adj.

c1600 Norden Spec. Brit., Cornw. (1728) 58 The next day this potentate becometh 'How dee neighbour' agayne. 1654 Gayton Pleas. Notes iv. vi-vii. 212 His how d'you man comes every day to know how I slept last night. 1797 A. M. Bennett Beggar Girl (1813) II. 130 The how-d'ye cards of all the lords, ladies [etc.]. 1806 Wolcott Wks. (1812) V. 297 No how-d'ye visits, my cool Neighbours make. 1931 Times 5 Nov. 13/4 The howdy folk of Kentucky may bring forth their best. 1932 E. Wallace When Gangs came to London xxiii. 224 It seems that this guy has been on howdy terms with the Big Boy ever since he came to town.

Hand, n. A singular instrument worn at the end of a human arm and commonly thrust into somebody's pocket.

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

Keith:

Since John Adams partisan politics has insured that after four years half the country hates the incumbent. If anything, the Founding Fathers were hated more than Bush in their time. Indeed, were Mother Teresa to endure four years of venom half the country would have hated HER. Perhaps it is the human condition that a free people (rather, roughly half of them . . .) are doomed to hate their leaders. Adams trembled at the risks partisan politics foisted upon a fledgling nation and doubtless would be amazed we made it THIS far!

Best,

Will
Oconomowoc, WI

To the Editor:

Despite all the castigating and acts of (half-)contrition, there is one obvious and simple way to show that torture is not the American way and to win back the war.

Turn over the principals, both military and contract personnel, to the Iraqi council that will be installed on June 30. Let the Iraqis conduct the investigations and the trials, and find and carry out the sentences.

For good measure, appoint an Iraqi in charge of all prisons.

Anything short of a dramatic, sincere show of understanding and atonement will only further inflame the world, and with it a large part of America.

Such atrocities demand unprecedented sacrifice by our administration.

ALAN WELLS
Pittsburgh, May 6, 2004

Just as women have special reason to focus on a man's ability to provide resources, men have special reason to focus on the ability to produce babies. That means, among other things, caring greatly about the age of a potential mate, since fertility declines until menopause, when it falls off abruptly. The last thing evolutionary psychologists would expect to find is that a plainly postmenopausal woman is sexually attractive to the average man. They don't find it. (According to Bronislaw Malinowski, Trobriand Islanders considered sex with an old woman "indecorous, ludicrous, and unaesthetic.") Even before menopause, age matters, especially in a long-term mate; the younger a woman, the more children she can bear. In every one of [David] Buss's thirty-seven cultures, males preferred younger mates (and females preferred older mates).

The importance of youth in a female mate may help explain the extreme male concern with physical attractiveness in a spouse (a concern that Buss also documented in all thirty-seven cultures). The generic "beautiful woman"—yes, she has actually been assembled, in a study that collated the seemingly diverse tastes of different men—has large eyes and a small nose. Since her eyes will look smaller and her nose larger as she ages, these components of "beauty" are also marks of youth, and thus of fertility. Women can afford to be more open-minded about looks; an oldish man, unlike an oldish woman, is probably fertile.

(Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life [New York: Vintage Books, 1995 (1994)], 65 [endnotes omitted])

Old Benjamin over at Advisory Opinion has just commented on my post of yesterday. See here. Good work, Ben. I couldn't have said it better, except to add that fetuses are innocent and attackers are not. Feminists want the right to destroy the innocent but not the guilty.

Read this column by Ruben Navarrette of The Dallas Morning News. (You'll have to sign in, if you've never done so, but it's free and quick.) Among other things, Navarrette complains that the White House isn't forthcoming with journalists. But why should it be? Journalists don't report the news; they try to shape public opinion, usually to the Left. They've become advocates and adversaries rather than dispassionate observers and faithful reporters. If you knew that someone was out to get you, would you cooperate with him or her? I didn't think so. I refuse on principle to talk to journalists. I don't so much as return their calls or respond to their letters. Usually, all they want from me is a juicy quotation, wrenched out of context. Journalists use others as mere means to their ends.

Just as Dorothy had the power to return to Kansas, journalists have the power to regain both the trust of those in power and the respect of the American people. They must return to their noble and important mission of reporting the news, fairly and objectively. They must cease to be partisans and players. Is that too much to ask? As I have argued ad nauseam in this blog and elsewhere, you can't both be respected as an authority and be a player. You can be one or the other, but not both. This has been the downfall of science, philosophy, history, and journalism. Everyone wants to be a player. Everyone wants to be in the arena. Shouldn't someone be reporting (and studying) what goes on in the arena, without intervening in the events there?

Today's link is to Philosophy in Cyberspace.

No, I'm not referring to the Sioux warrior. Two readers who went out of their way to send insulting letters to me about my latest column on Tech Central Station complained that I posted the letters without permission. Think about it. They showed no courtesy to me, but complained that I showed no courtesy to them. That, my friends, is gall.

Ambition, n. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.

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

The Bush-haters will hate this story and the accompanying photograph. They will say that it's a Rovian plot to portray President Bush as someone who cares about people. These are the same people who believed President Clinton whenever he bit his lower lip and said he felt his interlocutor's pain. (Thanks to James Taranto of Best of the Web Today for the link.)

If feminism is about empowerment of women, it should support private gun ownership by women. See here. The more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens, the safer our world.

Here is Nick Gillespie's column about John Kerry. Interesting.

I don't always agree with Christopher Hitchens, but I admire and respect him. Here (in case you missed it) is his take on the humiliation and abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers. Amen.

To the Editor:

"The Elements of Common Sense," by John Rosenthal (Op-Ed, May 3), is a sharp, painful rap on the knuckles for the few of us who cling to, and even worship, the rules of punctuation that we were taught 50-plus years ago.

Quoting "to boldly go" as an example of the evolution in language leaves me pondering if the egregious "between you and I" is the next to be accepted as natural and correct.

MARY RAMNICEANU
New York, May 3, 2004

To the Editor:

Would John Rosenthal (Op-Ed, May 3) have phrased his views on punctuation as, "The rule's dont matter as long as you're meaning is clear"? Any reader can tell perfectly well that "rule's" is supposed to mean "the plural of rule," that "dont" is supposed to be an abbreviation for "do not," and that "you're" is supposed to mean "belonging to you."

Yet to any educated reader, those errors would still leap off the page, giving the impression that the author was either uneducated or too lazy to check his grammar.

Violating the conventions of grammar and spelling is like flouting social norms; it may make sense to defy them to make a point, but you must first demonstrate that you understand them for your defiance to have any meaning.

AMY LIVINGSTON
Highland Park, N.J., May 3, 2004

Dr. Burgess-Jackson

I recently read your article. I regularly read articles from Tech Central Station. It keeps me thinking.

I have gone somewhat the opposite path from you. I voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964, and since then Humphrey, McGovern, (could not vote in 1976), Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, (could not vote in 1992), Clinton, and Gore.

I think your article is a straw man. But little in your article matched the liberals I know. I would have hoped you could do better than that.

Steven L. Chenault, Newport News, Virginia

Today's link is to The Window: Philosophy on the Internet.

When I was in graduate school at The University of Arizona in the mid-1980s, I wrote a column entitled "On Writing" for one of the state bar publications. Some of the columns were reprinted in national periodicals, including one for legal secretaries. It was fun. One of the columns I wrote was on mixed metaphors. Another was on misuse of the word "literally." Yet another was on apostrophes.

I'm also interested in clichés. Starting today, I'm going to discuss either a cliché or a mixed metaphor every Thursday in this blog. You're welcome to send examples, although I'll probably have enough for my needs. If you send something, please include a link to the original so I can confirm and cite it. Perhaps Bryan A. Garner, author of Garner's Modern American Usage (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), will find some of them useful.

Let's begin with mixed metaphors. Here is Garner, from his book A Dictionary of Modern American Usage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998):

A metaphor is a figure of speech in which one thing is called by the name of something else, or is said to be that other thing. Unlike similes, which use like or as, metaphorical comparisons are implicit—not explicit. Skillful use of metaphor is one of the highest attainments of writing; graceless and even aesthetically offensive use of metaphors is one of the commonest scourges of writing.

Although a graphic phrase often lends both force and compactness to writing, it must seem contextually agreeable. That is, speaking technically, the vehicle of the metaphor (i.e., the literal sense of the metaphorical language) must accord with the tenor of the metaphor (i.e., the ultimate, metaphorical sense), which is to say the means must fit the end. To illustrate the distinction between the vehicle and the tenor of a metaphor, in the statement that essay is a patchwork quilt without discernible design, the makeup of the essay is the tenor, and the quilt is the vehicle. It is the comparison of the tenor with the vehicle that makes or breaks a metaphor.

A writer would be ill advised, for example, to use rustic metaphors in a discussion of the problems of air pollution, which is essentially a problem of the bigger cities and outlying areas. Doing that mismatches the vehicle with the tenor.

Yet the greater problem occurs when one metaphor crowds another. The purpose of an image is to fix the idea in the reader's or hearer's mind. If disparate images appear in abundance, the audience is left confused or sometimes laughing, at the writer's expense. This problem is more forgivable in oratory than in writing, for with the latter the perpetrator can be charged with malice aforethought. Oratorical falls from grace are legion. Some time ago someone collected the oratorical gems of Michigan legislators: "This bill goes to the very heart of the moral fiber of the human anatomy."/ "From now on, I am watching everything you do with a fine-toothed comb." The following classic example comes from a speech by Boyle Roche in the Irish Parliament, delivered in about 1790: "Mr. Speaker, I smell a rat. I see him floating in the air. But mark me, sir, I will nip him in the bud." Perhaps the supreme example of the comic misuse of metaphor occurred in the speech of a scientist who referred to "a virgin field pregnant with possibilities." (pages 425-6; italics in original)

Here's today's mixed metaphor. Fred Gaudelli, producer of Monday Night Football, explained recently why Lisa Guerrero was being replaced as sideline reporter beginning this fall: "I just don't think that Lisa's talent matched up with what that role called for. It was my hope that we would work like gangbusters to expedite that curve as quickly as we could. But in the end, the talent and the role were not compatible." (Barry Horn, "Sideline Shuffle: Say Goodbye to Guerrero," The Dallas Morning News, 4 May 2004, at 1C)

Who says philosophers are boring and otherworldly? Look at all the interesting and practical things Dr Janet Sisson is doing.

The main irrationality of religion is preferring comfort to truth; and it is this that makes religion a very harmful thing on balance, a sort of endemic disease that has so far prevented human life from reaching its full stature.

(Richard Robinson, An Atheist's Values [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964], 117)

Donald L. Luskin is smart and funny—a rare combination in these mean-spirited, overserious times. See here.

Six months and twenty-six minutes ago I posted my first blog entry. See here. It's been a great ride. I'm pretty sure I posted at least one item each day during that span. On most days, as you know if you've been along for the ride, I posted several. My visitor counter shows "47,831." Since it took a while to build my readership (thank you!), I hope to hit 100,000 visitors by my first anniversary on 5 November 2004. That will be an average of 273.2 visitors per day for a full (leap) year. They say that most blogs fail, in the sense that their creators give up on them. Not this one. I'm as excited about this blog as I was when I started it. It is interwoven into my life—which may tell you how boring my life is. But boredom, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. I write; therefore I am.

Distress, n. A disease incurred by exposure to the prosperity of a friend.

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

Dear Mr. Burgess-Jackson,

I have just finished reading your column of April 27th, on Tech Central Station, and I feel compelled to express my disappointment in finding that such a well-educated individual can espouse such an ignorant point of view. I find it especially galling as you are attempting to paint all liberals with the same broad brush.

Are there liberals with the agenda of which you speak? Of course there are, just as there are conservatives with extreme points of view, but they are in the minority. But more to my point, the philosophy that you describe is nothing short of socialism and possibly communism. And on top of that, you suggest that we shun accountability. I take offense with all of these characterizations.

I am the antithesis of what you try to portray as the typical liberal. I'm 58, a retired Army officer with 15 years of active duty service. I served from Carter through the Clinton administrations, saw combat on several continents and saw many changes to the military in that time. I also became a liberal Democrat after years of being a moderate Republican. Why did I change, you may ask? It's rather simple. I grew weary of the cynical nature of the right, their lack of desire to include minorities and women in the process of governing and the general arrogance I encountered from my conservative brethren.

The issue really hit home one day when a group of rich, white young men were leaving the campaign office of a certain Southern California politician who happens to have been a lifelong friend of mine. It seems that a gardener contracted by the business park had the temerity to park near one of the young men's Mercedes. Apparently he dropped some wet clippings near the young man's door.

I won't go into details, but suffice to say that I haven't heard such a racist, misogynistic, and disgusting stream of vulgarities since boot camp. So, I confronted these young men. (I was in my Class A uniform at the time). I won't go into the specifics of this encounter, but suffice to say that they seemed little interested in showing respect to a military veteran. After words were exchanged and I was physically threatened, they decided better of it and tore out of the lot, narrowly missing a pedestrian.

After I relayed this incident to my friend's campaign director, he shrugged and asked, "What would you like me to do about it?" I was taken aback for a moment and said, "Are these the kind of people you want working on this campaign?" He replied that they were important fundraisers and he wasn't prepared to challenge them for their remarks, irrespective of how the incident might reflect on my friend. I told him that was unacceptable and that if these men were not held accountable and made to apologize to the worker AND me, I would refuse to have anything further to do with the campaign.

And a man I thought was my friend of over 20 years has never bothered to address this issue or apologize on their behalf. But does it mean all conservatives act in this manner? Thankfully no, but enough of those I've met that have expressed similar hateful opinions forced me to examine my own values and ideals.

And before you think I've missed your point, let me go a few steps further. You see, I have owned my own business for many years. I've enriched my employees and myself by relating to them as human beings, clearly expressing my expectations and then holding people accountable for their results and rewarding them based on performance and commitment. At the same time, I've listened to their issues, personal and professional, and helped whenever possible. As a result, I have 2nd generation employees and have kept turnover to less than 8% year after year. And I've released only 4 employees in the last 5 years while never having a layoff.

Could I have made more money? Sure. Would my employees or I be any happier? I doubt it. I think I've learned as many lessons from them as they have from me and this has created a family atmosphere I wouldn't trade to be CEO of Microsoft. And it's because I've treated people with compassion and a firm hand.

This is liberalism to me. Not handouts, but help. Not a caste system, but treating all people with respect. Paying a living wage and rewarding for results. Helping them create a future so that their world can be a better place.

This is why I support a liberal ideology: not because I hate conservatives, not because I can't articulate my point of view, and not because I think the right is stupid. But I have seen conservatives continually pull back when they've been asked to help out of their pocket. I have seen conservatives intentionally mislead and lie to the populace about the facts of a matter and I have seen conservatives exhibit a basic lack of human compassion and utter arrogance that I can't bring myself to watch any longer.

Are we perfect? No, of course not. We have just as many radicals as the right. But the majority among us tries to exhibit ourselves with dignity and a passion for liberty that appears to be slipping away from us under the current administration. But make no mistake about it, whether a liberal or conservative says it, we know when we're being lied to. We don't try to convince ourselves otherwise.

Sincerely,
FT Valdespino

Just as bringing children or companion animals into one's life guarantees a certain amount of misery (to go along with the joy), becoming a philosopher guarantees a certain amount of frustration (to go along with the satisfaction). The philosopher, as such, is trained to identify confusions and fallacies. But confusions and fallacies are rampant, especially on television programs devoted to public affairs. A philosopher who watches such programs will be eternally frustrated.

Here's an example. Ted Rall produced a vicious and deeply offensive cartoon (see here) about Pat Tillman, the professional football player turned soldier who died recently in Afghanistan. The other night there was a discussion of this on one of the cable networks I watch. (I believe it was MSNBC, and I believe the program was Scarborough Country, hosted by former congressman Joe Scarborough.) One guest argued that Rall should not have produced the cartoon. The other insisted that Rall had a First Amendment right to do so.

It went on like this for some time. The parties never engaged one another! The guest who kept bringing up the First Amendment's right to freedom of speech evidently thought that it disposed of the moral question whether Rall should have produced the cartoon. It does not. Whether I have a moral or legal right to do X and whether, all things considered, I should do X are different issues. The former bears on the latter, but it does not resolve it.

Here are some things I have a legal right to do but shouldn't:

1. Build a fence between my neighbor's house and my own to spite my neighbor.

2. Spank my child if there are other means, such as denial of a benefit, to achieve the same disciplinary goals.

3. Insult people by calling them "fat," "ugly," or "stupid."

4. Eat meat.

5. Let strangers drown when I can easily save them.

6. Break a promise (or lie) to a friend.

7. Commit adultery.

8. Conceive children before I am financially and emotionally ready to be a parent.

The point I'm making about legal rights applies just as strongly to moral rights. There's a logical (conceptual) difference between (1) having a moral right to do something and (2) it being morally right to do it. That the word "right" appears in both expressions doesn't mean it plays the same role or has the same meaning in each.

Rights are entitlements. To have a right to do X is to be entitled to do X. To have a right to X is to be entitled to X. Rights create a kind of moral space within which one may choose. But how one chooses within that space depends on other considerations, such as whether one's actions set back the interests of others, whether one's actions offend others, and whether one has a good reason for one's choice. Simply insisting that one has a right to do X doesn't answer the question. It evades the question.

Here's another way to look at it. There's a difference between having a right and exercising a right. The issue concerning Ted Rall is not whether he has a right to produce the offensive cartoon (of course he does) but whether, morally speaking, he should exercise that right. Arguably, he should not have. I say "arguably" because it's arguable. Unfortunately, the discussants never argued it. They passed each other like ships in the night, which must have frustrated every philosophically minded viewer who happened to be watching.

To the Editor:

Why must the United States be first in scientific achievements? If science is valuable because it produces economic benefits, then it makes sense to worry about increasing competition from other nations. But if science is valuable because it produces new knowledge, then a world with more highly qualified scientists could bring more discoveries at a faster pace.

Shouldn't we see a larger and livelier scientific community as a welcome development?

REBECCA DRESSER
St. Louis, May 3, 2004
The writer is a professor of law and ethics in medicine, Washington University.

The Left is petrified by Ralph Nader's presidential candidacy. See here for the latest manifestation.

For someone of the left who might be presumed to be committed to equality, Brian Leiter is obsessed with hierarchy and status. Many of us believe he is doing real damage to the profession (and discipline) of philosophy. See here.

How are you? I would like to wish you good health, prosperity, and joyful life on occasion of Nepalese New year 2061 which will fall at April 13.

I would like to invite you to join www.nphilosophy.org.

With best regards,
Dr. Govinda Sharan Upadhayaya
Chair and professor
Institute of Philosophy,
Post Box Number 15142 KPC 1000,
Katmandu, Nepal

Peg Kaplan over at what if? just passed the 3,000 mark for blog visitors. Congratulations, Peg! I'm proud of you. Those of you who haven't visited Peg's site should do so. Today's posts illustrate her whimsical, wacky wit and her wonderful, worldly wisdom.

I received a nice letter from a California college student about the unusual combination of conservatism and concern for animals that I exemplify. See here. I'll write about this soon. There is nothing in conservatism that precludes a belief that animals matter, morally, and that much of what we do to them (or fail to do for them) is wrong. I won't go so far as to say that conservatism commits one to caring about animals, but it's certainly compatible with it. If it weren't, I'd be a walking contradiction.

[O]ne can become a member of the élite only if one adopts its ideology and its habits: equality, including equality of women and 'racial' equality, does not mean equality of traditions; it means equality of access to one particular tradition—the tradition of the White Man. White Liberals supporting the demand for equality have opened the promised land—but it is a promised land built according to their own specifications, filled with their own favourite playthings and accessible only in accordance with their particular requirements (cf. the importance of 'intelligence' tests for access to all sorts of activities).

(Paul Feyerabend, "Democracy, Elitism, and Scientific Method," Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy and the Social Sciences 23 [March 1980]: 3-18, at 14 [italics in original; endnote omitted])

Is Bill Clinton about to sabotage the Kerry campaign? Dick Morris—the smartest political observer alive—thinks so. See here.

I'm with Pat Buchanan (see here), whose conservative credentials can't be questioned. Let's get out of Iraq. This is not an admission of failure. The war was a glorious success. We accomplished our goals of punishing a mass murderer and liberating a people. It's time to let the Iraqis rebuild their country and learn how to govern themselves.

Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.

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

To the Editor:

I take issue with "Sex and the Cities," by David Brooks (column, May 1). The real kicker was his blithe statement that there is an "overwhelming body of evidence to suggest that marriage correlates highly with happiness."

I'm not sure what this evidence is. There is, however, a staggering body of evidence suggesting that financial security and happiness correlate highly. And there is another huge body of evidence suggesting that high minimum wages, an even distribution of income, well-financed public health services and widespread access to free public education help significantly reduce poverty and increase happiness at the community level.

Incidentally, all of these things also make family formation easier.

IVANA BOTTINI
Beausoleil, France, May 1, 2004

To the Editor:

David Brooks (column, May 1) says we are replacing marriage with "hooking up." The corrosive effects of the sexual revolution and its continuing aftermath even harm the lives of those who do not actively participate in the sexual marketplace by dwindling the pool of serious mates interested in family and lifelong marriage.

I know countless young women, upper-middle-class, smart, savvy women, who have serial sexual relationships with men who disappear one day, after a few months, without so much as a goodbye. I'd hate to have that experience even once, but for many women it is the norm. I do not know one woman who wants to live her life this way, but they are losing the game.

Society used to push men into doing what was best for everybody (men may benefit more from marriage, if studies are correct). It seems that more freedom doesn't produce better choices.

KATHY CURTIN
New Haven, May 1, 2004

Today's link is to Philosophy Around the Web.

Dear Professor Burgess-Jackson,

I am with FOX News Channel's "Heartland with John Kasich." Mr. Kasich is a former Ohio Congressman who hosts a weekly show which focuses on news of the day and politics. I am writing to you in regards to your article on "Explaining Liberal Anger." I might be doing a segment on it this Saturday, May 8th (sometime between 8-9 PM EST.)

I am in and out of meetings for the rest of today . . . but I can be reached at 212-301-xxxx.

Sincerely,
Domenic Camia
FOX News Channel

Keith,

I think you (and most of your readers) will like the following quotation:

The United States of America has long shown itself to be the most magnanimous, the most generous country in the world. Wherever there is a flood, an earthquake, a fire, a natural disaster, disease, who is the first to help? The United States. Who helps the most and unselfishly? The United States.

And what do we hear in reply? Reproaches, curses, "Yankee Go Home." American cultural centers are burned, and the representatives of the Third World jump on tables to vote against the United States.

But this does not take the load off America's shoulders. The course of history—whether you like it or not—has made you the leaders of the world. Your country can no longer think provincially. Your political leaders can no longer think only of their own states, of their parties, of petty arrangements which may or may not lead to promotion. You must think about the whole world, and when the new political crisis in the world will arise (I think we have just come to the end of a very acute crisis and the next one will come any moment) the main decisions will fall anyway on the shoulders of the United States of America.

It is from Aleksandr L. Solzhenitsyn's famous talk "Words of Warning to America" from 1975. Here is a link to the whole text.

Best
Ian Trump

Yesterday I condemned the humiliation and abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers. See here. I supported the war, but it must be conducted properly, by which I mean in accordance with moral principle, the main principle being respect for persons. Will my liberal friends condemn the vicious cartoon by Ted Rall? We will never regain civility in our discourse unless people of good will condemn excesses.

I'd like to thank Right Wing News for naming AnalPhilosopher Website of the Day. See here. (Scroll to the bottom and look—where else?—on the right.) Thanks to Steve Headley over at Texas Conservative for the, er, head's up. By the way, I added Right Wing News to my blogroll, in case you forget how to get there or want to go directly there from my blog.

Here is what passes for humor on the left. I'm waiting for liberals to repudiate this viciousness. (Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the link.)

If you're already reading Dr John J. Ray's blog every day, ignore this post. If you're not, click here. I wouldn't let a day go by without checking in with my polymathic friend Down Under. Keep up the good work, John! I think I speak for Peg Kaplan, Steve Headley, Bill Keezer, and many others when I say that you teach, entertain, and inspire us.

Peg Kaplan doesn't like labels, but the title of this post describes her. See here for her latest batch of blog entries. I'm glad Peg entered the blogosphere a couple of months ago. She increases both its average intelligence and its average goodness.

I want to go on record as condemning the American soldiers who humiliated and abused Iraqi prisoners. See here for the grisly images. (Thanks to James Taranto of Best of the Web Today for the link.) I cannot express my disgust and outrage in words. Suffice it to say that all who were involved in these abominable incidents, which are sure to inflame hatred for Americans (and may cost American lives), should be swiftly and severely punished. They are a disgrace to the military, to their families, and to their country.

Steve Headley, a.k.a. Texas Conservative, is back from Europe and ready to kick liberal butt. See here. Good to have you back, Steve. Europe ain't no place for a civilized person.

Today's link is to Erratic Impact. (See here for an explanation of this series.)

Some people (including readers of my blogs) appear to think that in our dealings with animals, it's enough to refrain from making them suffer. This explains why people think it's acceptable to raise animals for food, provided they are not made to suffer along the way and provided they are killed painlessly. Some would insist, further, that any animal put to death be replaced by an equally happy animal, thus keeping the total happiness of the world the same.

We don't think this way about humans. Suppose I had a taste for human flesh. Would it be acceptable for me to raise happy humans, the way Smallholder raises happy calves (see here), and then kill them painlessly? What's the difference? Why the double standard? Why do we think like consequentialists with respect to animals but insist on deontology for humans? Why do we view animals, but not humans, as interchangeable and (therefore) replaceable?

Think about why it's wrong to kill humans. (Here I draw on Don Marquis's essay on abortion, from which I have learned much.) To kill a human is to deprive him or her of a future that contains activities, enjoyments, projects, and experiences. Life is the precondition for these things. Without it, they cannot exist. Even a painless killing deprives a human of these valued things.

But animals have futures that contain activities, enjoyments, and experiences, although perhaps not projects in the strict sense. Their lives are the preconditions for these things. Without their lives, these things cannot exist. Even a painless killing deprives an animal of these valued things.

The cases are parallel. You might object that humans and animals are different. Of course they're different. But are the differences morally relevant? Humans differ among themselves, but not all the differences are morally relevant. We don't let skin color, for example, affect one's rights. Why is species membership morally relevant? How could it be, since it's a biological concept? Species is no more relevant than race is, and you don't think race is relevant.

Your life is the most important thing you have, since it's the foundation on which everything else you value is built. This is as true for cows, pigs, and chickens as it is for you. What makes it wrong for someone to kill you is that it deprives you of these valued activities and experiences. That's precisely why it's wrong to kill animals. Apply the same standard to both cases. Be a consequentialist through and through, like Peter Singer, or be a deontologist through and through, like me (PDF). Don't be a consequentialist with respect to animals and a deontologist with respect to humans. That's irrational and self-serving.

Yes, indeed, Kerry resembles a cadaver with a bad haircut and seems like a sure loser. But as you say [see here], Al Gore seemed like a sure loser too. And Gore just about won. I know 2000 was a freak election, but frankly I'm starting to doubt my own instincts. My gut feeling tells me Bush will win barring disaster in Iraq or a sudden economic collapse. But I don't trust my gut feeling anymore.

Traditional societies divide into upper, middle and working class. In modern societies that division is overlaid by another, which also contains three classes. The new classes are, in ascending order, the morons, the yuppies and the stars. The first watch TV, the second make the programmes, and the third appear on them. And because those who appear on the screen cultivate the manners of the people who are watching them, implying that they are only there by accident, and that tomorrow it may very well be the viewer's turn, all possibility of resentment is avoided. At the same time, the emotional and intellectual torpor induced by TV neutralizes the social mobility that would otherwise enable the morons to change their lot. So obvious is this, that it is dangerous to say it. Class distinctions have not disappeared from modern life; they have merely become unmentionable.

(Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism, rev. 3d ed. [South Bend, IN: St. Augustine's Press, 2002], 169 [first edition published in 1980])

To the Editor:

Although Eric Schlosser (Op-Ed, April 26) makes a valid point that medical marijuana should be made available to anyone with chronic pain, epilepsy and so on, his plea to decriminalize marijuana is dangerous and shortsighted. As Mr. Schlosser clearly states, "marijuana is a powerful, mind-altering drug."

This country presently has scores of individuals battling alcohol addiction, addiction to illegal drugs and addiction to legal, over-the-counter drugs. Making marijuana legal will send the signal to children that using this "mind-altering" drug is perfectly acceptable and will only add to our country's growing problem of drug dependency.

WILLIAM LOWN
Bronxville, N.Y., April 26, 2004

John Kerry is done. The man to whom Democrats scurried because he seemed more "electable" than Howard Dean is now the man from whom Democrats are scurrying because he seems "unelectable." See here. The Democrats are frantic and desperate, as are the special interests to whom they're beholden. Do you think for a moment that the abortion industry will support someone who's going to lose? Abortionists will bail on him in an instant. So will the civil-rights industry, the anti-war industry, the environmental industry, the teaching industry, the gun-hating industry, the litigation industry, and the welfare industry. All they care about is winning, i.e., securing power. Without power, they're just screeching voices.

What is it with the Democrats? This is the second consecutive unattractive candidate they have put up. I thought Al Gore was about as unattractive a candidate as could be imagined, but John Kerry is right there with him. Gore thought his breeding entitled him to be president. Kerry wants to be president, but he doesn't know why. Neither has a vision of American greatness. Neither has the capacity to inspire. Both are stilted, clumsy, mean, and unlikeable. Good job, Democrats.

Take, v.t. To acquire, frequently by force but preferably by stealth.

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

The first time somebody said "Déjà vu all over again" (was it Yogi Berra?), it was funny. It has not been funny since. Can we please stop saying it? "Déjà vu" means already seen, so "Déjà vu all over again" means already seen all over again. That's a waste of three good words. Stop it! Everybody gets to use the expression once. If you've used it, retire it.

See here for a post about bullfighting.

Cambridge University Press has made an issue of one of its journals—the Leiden Journal of International Law—available to all comers. See here. I highly recommend the essay by Ivo H. Daalder entitled "The Use of Force in a Changing World—US and European Perspectives." You will need to download the essay in order to read it. It's in PDF format.

Today's link is to Maja's World.

To the Editor:

"And the Rich Get Smarter," by David L. Kirp (Op-Ed, April 30), complains that California community college tuition of "only about $100 a semester" is too much for poorer students to bear.

How so? I certainly did not come from privilege. I joined the Army for three years before going to college. I worked as a busboy 25 hours a week while in college. Now that I have decided to study law, I turned down a prestigious private law school and will attend an affordable public law school.

If a young American does not have the money to go to college, then he or she should earn the money before going to college or take out a student loan.

JASON N. HALL
Chapel Hill, N.C., April 30, 2004

I don't know the first thing about acting, and I'm certainly no comedian, but I have to believe that the cardinal sin of live comedy is cracking up. Did you see last night's episode of Saturday Night Live? In one of the skits (I believe it was called "Debbie Downer"), six or seven people, including the guest host, Lindsay Lohan, were seated at a table in a restaurant. Someone cracked a smile. This had a ripple effect on the others. Before long, everyone (with the possible exception of Fred Armisen) was either laughing or trying to suppress laughter.

The skit was ruined. It was all very unprofessional. Don't say it's comedy. Comedians are actors, playing roles. It's the audience, not the actors, who are supposed to laugh. Laughter while playing a role is no more appropriate than crying while playing a role—unless that's what the role calls for. The reason I say that cracking up is the cardinal sin of comedy is that it's contagious. When one person laughs, the others have to work even harder to resist laughing. When everyone else is cracking up, it takes a superhuman effort to resist.

The worst culprits, as far as the current cast is concerned, are Jimmy Fallon and Horatio Sanz. Fallon appears to be unable to resist laughing when Sanz talks. This has happened many times before, in many skits. Once Fallon starts laughing, Sanz follows suit, although he's usually better at resisting than Fallon is. If I were on the cast, I'd condemn Fallon's unprofessionalism. He makes everyone's job much harder than it should be. If I were the producer of the show, I'd let him know in no uncertain terms that laughter is unacceptable. He appears to think it's cute. It's not cute. It's childish.

The greatest actors on Saturday Night Live never cracked up. I'm thinking of Will Ferrell, Chris Kattan, Chris Parnell, and Ana Gasteyer. They were professionals. They must have been tempted many times to crack up, especially when working with Fallon, but they always resisted. I appreciate professionalism in all endeavors. Don't you?

Just twenty-one days after the first atomic test in the desert, the Japanese industrial city of Hiroshima was leveled by nuclear blast; never before had so many people—at least 130,000, probably many more—died from a single explosion. Just twenty-one years after Columbus's first landing in the Caribbean, the vastly populous island that the explorer had re-named Hispaniola was effectively desolate; nearly 8,000,000 people—those Columbus chose to call Indians—had been killed by violence, disease, and despair. It took a little longer, about the span of a single human generation, but what happened on Hispaniola was the equivalent of more than fifty Hiroshimas. And Hispaniola was only the beginning.

(David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992], ix-x [endnotes omitted])

Mr. Jackson,

It is odd that I (and many others) have used many of your arguments against liberal philosophy and liberals as group, to describe conservative philosophy and conservatives as a group. While I do believe there are many problems with liberal philosophy, I don't see Conservative philosophy as being any more coherent, reasonable less zealous or more personally responsible.

President Bush, the Conservatives fair haired boy, can barley speak a coherent sentence. It is no accident that his most loyal supporters are fundamentalist Christians, who are the very best example I can think of for zealotry, irrationality and inability to accept personal responsibility. Unlike Bush, I know that if I didn't perform my duties while in the military I would have been held personally responsible, and severely punished. However I did not have a rich and politically powerful father.

I would also point out that the very tone and demeanor of your article is similar to the "Liberal" attributes that you seem to revile so much. It is unfortunate that this type of hateful rhetoric as poisoned Liberal and Conservatives politics alike, and that there is no longer any rational debate going on in this country. People like me can no longer see much difference between Liberals and Conservatives, because they are both equally unenlightened and given to this kind of overly emotional ranting.

Sincerely,
Ken Schafer

One of my nonphilosophical colleagues at UTA used to accuse me of jingoism whenever I expressed love of country. He said it scornfully, as if patriotism were a sign of improper upbringing, philistinism, ignorance, or lack of intelligence.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., jingoism is "The policy or practices of the jingoes." In 1895, The Times used the word as follows: "The President . . . puts himself on record against the empty bluster which is the note of jingoism."

"Jingo" is defined by the OED as "A nickname for those who supported and lauded the policy of Lord Beaconsfield in sending a British fleet into Turkish waters to resist the advance of Russia in 1878; hence, one who brags of his country's preparedness for fight, and generally advocates or favours a bellicose policy in dealing with foreign powers; a blustering or blatant 'patriot'; a Chauvinist."

Here are some uses:

1878 G. J. Holyoake in Daily News 13 Mar. 3/4 The Jingoes in the Park. Ibid., The Jingoes—the new tribe of music hall patriots who sing the jingo song. 1879 Truth 22 May, The Jingoes ought to rejoice and be glad that their 'tall talk' did not drive us into a war with Russia last year. 1880 G. Duff in 19th Cent. Apr. 667 Our interest in Russia is that the Muscovite Jingoes should learn a little more geography. 1881 Gentl. Mag. Jan. 46 The Jingo is the aggregation of the bully. An individual may be a bully; but, in order to create Jingoism, there must be a crowd. 1897 Ld. Salisbury in Times 19 Jan., A well-working arbitration system would be an invaluable bulwark to defend the Minister from the jingoes. 1898 Times 18 Jan. 6/1 (N.Y. Corresp.) A school of politicians who, like the jingoes, are apt to use the word American aggressively, as the jingoes do.

The Oxford American Dictionary (1999) defines "jingo" as "a supporter of policy favoring war; a blustering patriot."

This latter definition suggests that jingoism is patriotism gone awry, or gone too far. The patriot, as such, is devoted to and ready to support and defend his or her country (OAD). The jingo (or jingoist) is belligerently patriotic. A patriot's love is tempered by reason. A jingoist's love is intemperate. Jingoism is to patriotism as rashness is to courage.

I believe these terms mark a real distinction in our thinking, and one worth preserving. Any attitude or trait can be carried too far. The word "jingoism" implies that one's patriotism has been carried too far. One's love for country ought not become a desire for war for its own sake or an excuse for belligerence. Nor should patriots engage in braggadocio or bluster. It is as inappropriate to say, "My dad can kick your dad's ass" as it is to say, "My country is stronger than yours." Bluster is bad everywhere, not just in connection with patriotism. If jingoism is bad, it's because it's blustery, not because it's patriotism.

When I think back to the contexts in which I was called jingoistic by my colleague, I recall neither belligerence nor bluster. I recall sincere expressions of love of country, together with judgments about this country's worthiness. I'm an American. It's part of my identity. I'm proud of my country and its accomplishments. I'm proud to live in a nation "conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," as Abraham Lincoln famously put it in his Gettysburg Address. This is a nation in which individuals matter. We have a Bill of Rights. We're deontologists, not consequentialists. We're principled, not pragmatic. It is a generous nation. Americans have suffered and died for the sake of nonAmericans everywhere. Why are we the destination of choice for people from all over the world? Think about it.

Is this nation perfect? Of course not. No nation is or ever will be perfect. Even a patriot can admit that the promise of equality made by Thomas Jefferson in The Declaration of Independence was not kept for nearly two centuries. It may not be fully kept even today. But that just shows that there's room for improvement. It doesn't show that this nation is immoral or unworthy of our devotion, or that attitudes such as love are inappropriate. A patriot doesn't say "My country is perfect," but only "My country is good." If love of one's parents doesn't require a belief that they are perfect, why should love of one's nation require that?

I sensed in talking to my colleague that he was ashamed to be an American. He was (and is) happy to take advantage of the liberty, opportunity, security, and prosperity this country has to offer, but he views patriotism as a relic of a primitive time, or as something only a yahoo could feel or express. In his mind, patriotism just is jingoism. When he heard a sincere expression of patriotism from me, he heard bellicosity, braggadocio, and bluster. With all due respect, he has cramped categories. Imagine having no separate categories in one's thinking for rashness and courageousness. In fact, we saw this recently. Pat Tillman, the professional football player who gave up a promising career and a comfortable life to defend his country from its enemies, has been vilified in liberal quarters for being rash. No. He was courageous. He risked his life—the foundation of all else he valued—for something greater than himself. He didn't risk too much for too little. He risked just the right amount. Pat Tillman was a patriot.

Jingoism is excessive love of country. We need a word for deficient love of country. That word would apply, sadly, to my colleague and to many other Americans.

Good, adj. Sensible, madam, to the worth of this present writer. Alive, sir, to the advantages of letting him alone.

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

Keith,

Just a note to let you know that the "Peaceable Kingdom" screening, that you so graciously announced on your blog earlier this month, went exceptionally well. We had over 80 people in the audience, unanimously positive comments on the survey cards and nice proceeds to contribute to our local farm sanctuaries.

Peaceable Kingdom is a beautiful film—a remarkable work of art and philosophy—I encourage you to see it if you haven't already.

Meanwhile, this e-card is to thank you for your support of our effort to show Peaceable Kingdom (turn up you speakers).

All the best,

Joanna

Today's link is to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The notion of carefully wrought bullshit involves . . . a certain inner strain. Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as inapposite. But in fact it is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen who—with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological testing, and so forth—dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right.

(Harry G. Frankfurt, "On Bullshit," chap. 10 in his The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988], 117-33, at 122 [essay first published in 1986])

To the Editor:

Re "Mort Sahl, Still Simmering After All These Years" (Arts pages, April 27): Why is it that when a liberal engages in vicious name-calling—like Mort Sahl's branding of the talk-show host Sean Hannity as a fascist—his words are described as being wickedly satiric, but when conservatives engage in this kind of rhetoric it is branded mean-spiritedness or McCarthyism?

MICHAEL L. NARDACCI
Albany, April 28, 2004

Mia Anna Mazza, "The New Evidentiary Privilege for Environmental Audit Reports: Making the Worst of a Bad Situation," Ecology Law Quarterly 23 (1996): 79.

Robert D'Amico, "Is Disease a Natural Kind?" Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 20 (October 1995): 551; Lawrie Reznek, "Disease About Kinds: Reply to D'Amico," Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 20 (October 1995): 571.

Laurie Zaring, "'Two Be or Not Two Be': Identity, Predication and the Welsh Copula," Linguistics and Philosophy 19 (April 1996): 103.

David Wasserman, "Let Them Eat Chances: Probability and Distributive Justice," Economics and Philosophy 12 (April 1996): 29.

Elisabeth A. Lloyd, "The Anachronistic Anarchist," Philosophical Studies 81 (March 1996): 247.