Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Blogging Hiatus...and Some Reading Recommendations

I'll be on a hiatus from blogging until early in the New Year.  In addition to all the fine blogs linked in the lefthand column, let me also recommend several interesting philosophy-oriented blogs for your reading pleasure over the holidays and hopefully after:

Philosophy of Biology

Garden of Forking Paths (Free Will/Moral Responsibility)

Ethical Werewolf

Ideas of Imperfection

Those are a few I make a point of checking periodically, but there are no doubt many others deserving of your attention; David Chalmers kindly maintains a list of philosophy-related blogs.

Good wishes to all for the New Year.

Student Made Up Story of Being Visited by Federal Agents for Requesting Mao Book

As several commenters to the original thread (now removed) suggested, the story was a fake.  (Thanks to Ruchira Paul, who first sent me the link.)  This, alas, will simply embolden the apologists for all the real fascist initiatives of this Administration, including, of course, the monitoring of libraries.  (On the fascist apologists, Dadahead has apt remarks.)

Friday Poem: "Magdalena"

Magdalena

Bending at the hip
she wipes the toilet seat
Then on her knees
Washes out the bowl
I wonder at her speed
Her gait her stride
The breeding in it
Her knuckling into dirt
Without a word
Her equanimity
whatever task I make

She tells me of Chile
“My country” as she says
And of a family
That works the earth
To whom she sends
A share of what she earns
I’ve come to know
Her vicissitudes
Her dreams her ways
Her pleasure in her boy
Who goes to Fordham Prep
The man who did not
Treat  her right
Whom she left behind
The seven days she spends
Pursuing bread

At Christmas I gesture
Out of obligation
Yet striving to be kind
And give a gift of cash

Then pausing weigh a thought
And reaching to a bookshelf
I bring Neruda forth
And offer it to her

She takes it to her breast
Her smile improves the light
“This is my Christmas” she says

It makes a fool’s heart leap

5/21-7/11/95, 6/l8/96, 1/26/98, 5/12/98

Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

More Reactions to the Dover Decision on Intelligent Design (with special attention to the unfortunate intervention by Professor Alschuler)

This blog has a rather lengthy compendium of links pertaining to yesterday's court decision.  The New York Times, meanwhile, has run a pleasingly direct editorial:

Judge Jones's decision was a striking repudiation of intelligent design, given that Dover's policy was minimally intrusive on classroom teaching. Administrators merely read a brief disclaimer at the beginning of a class asserting that evolution was a theory, not a fact; that there were gaps in the evidence for evolution; and that intelligent design provided an alternative explanation and could be further explored by consulting a book in the school library. Yet even that minimal statement amounted to an endorsement of religion, the judge concluded, because it caused students to doubt the theory of evolution without scientific justification and presented them with a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory.

The case was most notable for its searching inquiry into whether intelligent design could be considered science. The answer, after a six-week trial that included hours of expert testimony, was a resounding no.

The judge found that intelligent design violated the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking supernatural causation and by making assertions that cannot be tested or proved wrong. Moreover, intelligent design has not gained acceptance in the scientific community, has not been supported by peer-reviewed research, and has not generated a research and testing program of its own. The core argument for intelligent design - the supposedly irreducible complexity of key biological systems - has clear theological overtones. As long ago as the 13th century, St. Thomas Aquinas argued that because nature is complex, it must have a designer.

The religious thrust behind Dover's policy was unmistakable. The board members who pushed the policy through had repeatedly expressed religious reasons for opposing evolution, though they tried to dissemble during the trial. Judge Jones charged that the two ringleaders lied in depositions to hide the fact that they had raised money at a church to buy copies of an intelligent design textbook for the school library. He also found that board members were strikingly ignorant about intelligent design and that several individuals had lied time and again to hide their religious motivations for backing the concept. Their contention that they had a secular purpose - to improve science education and encourage critical thinking - was declared a sham.

Less pleasing is the intervention by Albert Alschuler, a distinguished criminal law expert at the University of Chicago, whose ill-informed and misleading comments on this decision have already been picked up with glee by the Discovery [sic] Institute shills.  (The first commenter on the Chicago site corrects some of the errors in Professor Alschuler's presentation as well.)  Professor Alschuler writes:

The first amendment makes intelligent design unmentionable in the classroom. 

But that is not what the decision held at all:  it held that it violates the Establishment Clause to include Intelligent Design as part of the science curriculum or to teach it to schoolchildren as though it were in competition with Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. 

While professing to offer no opinion concerning the truth of intelligent design, the court consistently reveals its contempt for this theory. 

But the theory warrants the contempt appropriate to misinformation and deceit, and which the court's opinion detailed:  it has generated no research program or results; it is supported by no evidence; it is creationism for those who have consulted a lawyer and a public relations expert.  (See the summary at 64 of the opinion, which is then amply documented in the subsequent pages.  The court could have put the point about supernatural causation more effectively, but otherwise the claims are sound.)

Most of the Dover opinion says in effect to the proponents of intelligent design, “We know who you are.  You’re Bible-thumpers.”  The opinion begins, “The religious movement known as Fundamentalism began in nineteenth century America as a response to social changes, new religious thought, and Darwinism.  Religiously motivated groups pushed state legislatures to adopt laws prohibiting public schools from teaching evolution, culminating in the Scopes ‘monkey trial’ of 1925.”  When the Fundamentalists (the court often capitalizes the word) found themselves unable to ban Darwinism, they championed “balanced treatment,” then “creation science,” and finally “intelligent design.”  According to the court, the agenda never changed.  Dover is simply Scopes trial redux.  The proponents of intelligent design are guilty by association, and today’s yahoos are merely yesterday’s reincarnated. 

There is no guilt-by-association argument in the court's opinion, and this is a serious misrepresentation of the court's methodical approach in this case, one that can not be rationalized by saying "in effect".  The court did not, in fact, "begin" with a discussion of fundamentalism; that discussion began on page 7 of the opinion in the context of establishing the constitutional standards governing adjudication of the controversy.  To that end, the court, quite correctly, reviews the history of efforts to impose versions of creationism in the public schools and the constitutional standards that evolved in response to legal challenges.  The court's (uncontroversial) interpretation of the "effect" prong of the Lemon test (for Establishment Clause violations) leads it to conclude that to determine whether or not the Dover Board policy "endorses" religion the policy must be considered from the standpoint of an informed, objective observer--an observer who is informed, among other things, about the relevant historical and cultural context in which the policy is adopted.  (See esp. 15-19 of the opinion.)  Because the meaning or "effect" of the Dover Board's actions can only be evaluated against the background of fundamentalist efforts to inject religion into the public school classroom, the court has to attend to that background.  (A technical sidenote:  the court, in fact, distinguished the "endorsement" test from the "effects" test, though noting that "the Lemon effect test largely covers the same ground as the endorsement test."  For reasons of simplicity, I'm just going to refer to the two interchangeably.)

If fundamentalism still means what it meant in the early twentieth century, however -- accepting the Bible as literal truth -- the champions of intelligent design are not fundamentalists.  They uniformly disclaim reliance on the Book and focus only on where the biological evidence leads. 

There is one irrelevant truth here and one falsehood.  It is true, but irrelevant, that the ID proponents are not committed to the literal truth of the Book of Genesis:  that is what they learned won't fly from the last round of successful constitutional challenges in the 1980s.  (As the court demonstrated (p. 33): "The weight of the evidence clearly demonstrates...that the systemic change from 'creation' to 'intelligent design' occurred sometime in 1987, after the Supreme Court's important Edwards decision.  This compelling evidence strongly supports Plantiffs' assertion that ID is creationism re-labeled.") 

It is false, however, that proponents of ID "focus only on where the biological evidence leads," and false for two reasons:  first, no inference to the best explanation of the evidence would support positing an intelligent designer (as the court nicely puts it, "ID is at bottom premised upon a false dichotomy, namely, that to the extent evolutionary theory is discredited, ID is confirmed" [71]); and second, the ID proponents routinely misrepresent the biological evidence, finding inexplicable complexity where there is none; all of this was amply documented at the trial and in the court's opinion (see esp. 76 ff.).  All of this is old news to anyone who has followed these tiresome debates.  All of it, alas, is absent from Professor Alschuler's version.

The court’s response – “well, that’s what they say, but we know what they mean” – is uncivil, an illustration of the dismissive and contemptuous treatment that characterizes much contemporary discourse.  Once we know who you are, we need not listen.  We’ve heard it all already. 

Unfortunately, the only party to this dispute saying "that's what they say, but we know what they mean" is Professor Alschuler, who simply ignores page after page of the court's opinion detailing the expert testimony and the evidence in the record as to the Dover Board's purposes and the scientific standing of ID, and instead says that what the court "really means" is some version of the "guilt-by-association" argument it nowhere makes.

The court offers convincing evidence that some members the Dover school board would  have been delighted to promote their old time religion in the classroom.  These board members apparently accepted intelligent design as a compromise, the nearest they could come to their objective within the law.  Does that make any mention of intelligent design unconstitutional?  It seems odd to characterize the desire to go far as the law allows as an unlawful motive.  People who try to stay within the law although they would prefer something else are good citizens.  The Dover opinion appears to say that the forbidden preference taints whatever the board may do, and if the public can discern the board’s improper desire, any action it takes also has an unconstitutional effect. 

This confusing paragraph seems to conflate the "effect" and "purpose" prongs of Lemon, which are clearly distinguished by the court.  The court argues that the Dover policy had the "effect" of endorsing religion (see esp. 38-42 of the opinion--or the summary at 49-50 [or at 63, for the case of the "effect" on adult members of the commmunity]); that dooms the policy quite independent of anyone's purposes.  The court also argues that, as an independent matter, the Dover Board's policy fails the purpose prong of Lemon (90 ff.), and it reaches that conclusion on the basis of dozens of pages of evidence adduced at trial showing the  clear religious objectives of Board members, as well as their attempts to cover-up those religious objectives.  As the court concluded (132):  "Any asserted secular purposes by the Board are a sham and are merely secondary to a religious objective."  That someone might have had a secular purpose for promoting a policy like Dover's is irrelevant to what purposes state actors actually had in this case.  (Of course, the problem is worse than that:  all the evidence adduced in the context of analyzing the "effect" of the policy suggests that there could be no secular, scientific purpose for adopting the policy.)

Professor Alschuler's intervention into this well-travelled terrain is not as bad, to be sure, as some other law professors who've written foolishly on this subject, but it is perhaps more troublesome because Alschuler is so much more prominent.  Already, as we noted, the Discovery [sic] Institute folks are touting his remarks.  Because the opinion is long, and most will not read it, the potential for unsuspecting readers to take Professor Alschuler's inaccurate presentation of the opinion at face value is real.   Here is hoping he will do better by the court's opinion the next time around!

If fundamentalism still means what it meant in the early twentieth century, however -- accepting the Bible as literal truth -- the champions of intelligent design are not fundamentalists.  They uniformly disclaim reliance on the Book and focus only on where the biological evidence leads. 

The court’s response – “well, that’s what they say, but we know what they mean” – is uncivil, an illustration of the dismissive and contemptuous treatment that characterizes much contemporary discourse.  Once we know who you are, we need not listen.  We’ve heard it all already. 

Unfortunately, the only party to this dispute saying "that's what they say, but we know what they mean" is Professor Alschuler, who simply ignores page after page of the court's opinion detailing the expert testimony and the evidence in the record as to the Dover Board's purposes and the scientific standing of ID, and instead says that what the court "really means" is some version of the "guilt-by-association" argument it nowhere makes.

The court offers convincing evidence that some members the Dover school board would  have been delighted to promote their old time religion in the classroom.  These board members apparently accepted intelligent design as a compromise, the nearest they could come to their objective within the law.  Does that make any mention of intelligent design unconstitutional?  It seems odd to characterize the desire to go far as the law allows as an unlawful motive.  People who try to stay within the law although they would prefer something else are good citizens.  The Dover opinion appears to say that the forbidden preference taints whatever the board may do, and if the public can discern the board’s improper desire, any action it takes also has an unconstitutional effect. 

This confusing paragraph seems to conflate the "effect" and "purpose" prongs of Lemon, which are clearly distinguished by the court.  The court argues that the Dover policy had the "effect" of endorsing religion (see esp. 38-42 of the opinion--or the summary at 49-50 [or at 63, for the case of the "effect" on adult members of the commmunity]); that dooms the policy quite independent of anyone's purposes.  The court also argues that, as an independent matter, the Dover Board's policy fails the purpose prong of Lemon (90 ff.), and it reaches that conclusion on the basis of dozens of pages of evidence adduced at trial showing the  clear religious objectives of Board members, as well as their attempts to cover-up those religious objectives.  As the court concluded (132):  "Any asserted secular purposes by the Board are a sham and are merely secondary to a religious objective."  That someone might have had a secular purpose for promoting a policy like Dover's is irrelevant to what purposes state actors actually had in this case.  (Of course, the problem is worse than that:  all the evidence adduced in the context of analyzing the "effect" of the policy suggests that there could be no secular, scientific purpose for adopting the policy.)

Professor Alschuler's intervention into this well-travelled terrain is not as bad, to be sure, as some other law professors who've written foolishly on this subject, but it is perhaps more troublesome because Alschuler is so much more prominent.  Already, as we noted, the Discovery [sic] Institute folks are touting his remarks.  Because the opinion is long, and most will not read it, the potential for unsuspecting readers to take Professor Alschuler's inaccurate presentation of the opinion at face value is real.   Here is hoping he will do better by the court's opinion the next time around!

Domestic Surveillance in Britain

Chris Bertram (Philosophy, Bristol) offers a useful reminder here.  The intrusiveness of cameras into all public (and some private) spaces here is really very weird.  The only mildly redeeming aspects of the situation are that (1) the judiciary here is quite independent and not bashful about stepping in to protect civil liberties, and (2) there is real political opposition, even within the Labor Party, as we saw in the case of the proposal to detain suspects without charges for 90 days.

Congressman Conyers Calls for Investigation into Grounds for Impeachment

Story here; an excerpt:

As President Bush and his aides scramble to explain new revelations regarding Bush's authorization of spying on the international telephone calls and emails of Americans, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, has begun a process that could lead to the censure, and perhaps the impeachment, of the president and vice president.

US Representative John Conyers, the Michigan Democrat who was a critical player in the Watergate and Iran-Contra investigations into presidential wrongdoing, has introduced a package of resolutions that would censure President Bush and Vice President Cheney and create a select committee to investigate the Administration's possible crimes and make recommendations regarding grounds for impeachment.

The Conyers resolutions add a significant new twist to the debate about how to hold the administration to account. Members of Congress have become increasingly aggressive in the criticism of the White House, with US Senator Robert Byrd, D-West Virginia, saying Monday, "Americans have been stunned at the recent news of the abuses of power by an overzealous President. It has become apparent that this Administration has engaged in a consistent and unrelenting pattern of abuse against our Country's law-abiding citizens, and against our Constitution." Even Republicans, including Senate Judiciary Committee chair Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania, are talking for the first time about mounting potentially serious investigations into abuses of power by the president.

But Conyers is seeking to do much more than schedule a committee hearing, or even launch a formal inquiry. He is proposing that the Congress use all of the powers that are available to it to hold the president and vice president to account - up to and including the power to impeach the holders of the nation's most powerful positions and to remove them from office.

The first of the three resolutions introduced by Conyers, H.Res.635, asks that the Congress establish a select committee to investigate whether members of the administration made moves to invade Iraq before receiving congressional authorization, manipulated pre-war intelligence, encouraged the use of torture in Iraq and elsewhere, and used their positions to retaliate against critics of the war.

The select committee would be asked to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment of Bush and Cheney.

The second resolution, H.Res.636, asks that the Congress to censure the president "for failing to respond to requests for information concerning allegations that he and others in his Administration misled Congress and the American people regarding the decision to go to war in Iraq, misstated and manipulated intelligence information regarding the justification for the war, countenanced torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of persons in Iraq, and permitted inappropriate retaliation against critics of his Administration, for failing to adequately account for specific misstatements he made regarding the war, and for failing to comply with Executive Order 12958." (Executive Order 12958, issued in 1995 by former President Bill Clinton, seeks to promote openness in government by prescribing a uniform system for classifying, safeguarding, and declassifying national security information.)

A third resolution, H.Res.637, would censure Cheney for a similar set of complaints.

"The people of this country are waking up to the severity of the lies, crimes, and abuses of power committed by this president and his administration," says Jon Bonifaz, a co-founder of the AfterDowningStreet.org coalition, an alliance of more than100 grassroots groups that has detailed Bush administration wrongdoing and encouraged a Congressional response. Bonifaz, an attorney and the author of the book, Warrior King: The Case for Impeaching George Bush (Nation Books), argues that, "Now is the time to return to the rule of law and to hold those who have defied the Constitution accountable for their actions."

There is more information at the new Censure Bush Coalition website.

Gutting on "Analytic" and "Continental" Philosophy

Gary Gutting (Philosophy, Notre Dame) has written a generous and informative review of my Future for Philosophy collection in which, towards the end, he considers the difference between "analytic" and "Continental" philosophy, which we had occasion to discuss a few weeks back (here and here) during the visit of the Stanley brothers.  Gutting writes:

I agree [with Leiter] that there is no fruitful analytic-Continental division in terms of substantive doctrines distinctively characteristic of the two sides. But it seems to me that we can still draw a significant distinction between analytic and Continental philosophy in terms of their conceptions of experience and reason as standards of evaluation. Typically, analytic philosophy reads experience in terms of common-sense intuitions (often along with their developments and transformations in science) and understands reason in terms of formal logic. Continental philosophy, by contrast, typically sees experience as penetrating beyond the veneer of common-sense and science, and regards reason as more a matter of intellectual imagination than deductive rigor. In these terms, Continental philosophy still exists as a significant challenge to the increasing hegemony of analytic thought and, as such, deserved a hearing in this volume.

I wonder what readers think of this way of demarcating approaches in light of the earlier discussions?

Harvard Tenures Siegel, Makes Tenured Offer to Kelly

Susanna Siegel (philosophy of mind and language) has been awarded tenure by Harvard University.  In addition, the University has approved a tenured offer to Sean Kelly (philosophy of mind, phenomenology), who last year was turned down for tenure at Princeton University.  These decisions are striking in two ways.

First, it's clearly time to stop saying that "no one gets tenure at Harvard," which used to be (almost always) the case during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.  In fact, the last four young philosophers to come up for tenure in the Harvard Philosophy Department in the last half-dozen years--Richard Heck (who has since left for Brown), James Pryor (who left for Princeton, and then NYU), Alison Simmons, and now Susanna Siegel--have all received tenure, a rate of tenure far higher than Princeton's, or any other top department's in recent memory.  The era in which Harvard (or Princeton) could expect to appoint the top established senior faculty from elsewhere is clearly over, and Harvard Philosophy, at least, now plainly recognizes the need to promote its best junior faculty.

Second, the tenured offer to Kelly, after the unfavorable decision by Princeton, provides some evidence for my contention that the field of philosophy is increasingly fractured in the U.S.  A generation ago it would have been unimaginable (am I wrong?) that Princeton's tenure reject would receive a tenured offer from Harvard, or vice versa.  (The list of distinguished philosophers turned down for tenure at Princeton and Harvard is, of course, long, but in all the other cases of which I'm aware many years elapsed before the philosophers in question ended up in peer departments.)  That this now happens reflects the fact that views about what work is important and high quality are now more divergent in philosophy than they were a generation ago. 

I should add that I purport only to be reporting sociological facts about the profession.  My personal view is that it's not a bad thing for there to be this kind of "fracturing" of judgments of quality and importance, since they are still within the space of reasonable disagreements, or so it seems to me.  That Harvard, the Department of Quine, should now step forward to commit a tenured line to a young philosopher conversant in phenomenology is as clear an indication one could imagine that times have changed in American philosophy.

Bush Crimes Commission

The indictments are here and the schedule of hearings here.  One suspects the "liberal media" like CNN and New York Times will manage not to cover this.

(Thanks to Eduardo Tenenbaum for the pointer.)

Federal Judge Hands the Pennsylvania Taliban a Stinging Defeat

A federal judge in Pennsylvania has barred the teaching of Intelligent Design creationism in Dover, Pennsylvania, and in terms that will give the conmen at the Discovery [sic] Institute a migraine:

The proper application of [the relevant constitutional tests requiring that government not endorse a particular religion and that its actions have a secular purpose] to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Board’s ID Policy  violates the Establishment Clause. In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it  is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents....

To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

With that said, we do not question that many of the leading advocates of ID have bona fide and deeply held beliefs which drive their scholarly endeavors. Nor do we controvert that ID should continue to be studied, debated, and discussed. As stated, our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom.

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court.  Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources. 

To preserve the separation of church and state mandated by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and Art. I, § 3 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, we will enter an order permanently enjoining Defendants from maintaining the ID Policy in any school within the Dover Area School District, from requiring teachers to
denigrate or disparage the scientific theory of evolution, and from requiring teachers to refer to a religious, alternative theory known as ID. We will also issue a declaratory judgment that Plaintiffs’ rights under the Constitutions of the United States and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania have been violated by Defendants’ actions.  Defendants’ actions in violation of Plaintiffs’ civil rights as guaranteed to them by the Constitution of the United States and 42 U.S.C. § 1983 subject Defendants to liability with respect to injunctive and declaratory relief, but also for nominal damages and the reasonable value of Plaintiffs’ attorneys’ services
and costs incurred in vindicating Plaintiffs’ constitutional rights.

It will be recalled that the pathological liars at the Discovery [sic] Institute wanted the Dover School Board to drop its policy, realizing that it would be a loser in the courts given the clear religious purpose behind the Board's actions, which were amply documented in the record.  What is particularly striking about the portion of the court's opinion I have seen, however, is that it does not rest solely on the imprudent candor of the Dover Board members, but states, unequivocally, that ID is not science (which, of course, it isn't...or, with a nod to Larry Laudan, it's obviously failed [or stilllborn] science, for which there could be no secular purpose in teaching to schoolchildren).

"Libertarians for Fascism"

I borrow the apt headline from Dadahead, who has the details.  Of course, the play libertarians in question are all bloggers.  Actual libertarians take a position worthy of their ideology.

God Exists!

More than 300 arguments proving it...here.  (Thanks to Pete Trosclair for the pointer.)

Philosopher Byrne To Stay at MIT, Turns Down Princeton and USC

Alex Byrne (philosophy of mind, metaphysics) at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology has turned down the tenured offers from Princeton University and the University of Southern California.  That's a good break for the small and excellent MIT department, which recently lost Joshua Cohen (political philosophy) to Stanford.

Friday Poem: "In the Examining Room"

In the Examining Room

The Minister of Health
is down the hall
in a room like this
(except for me)
I swing my legs
from my table perch
as omens rich
with immanence
infiltrate my mind

Voices soak
through wallboard dikes
the problems are not nice
ailing terms
their crowded names
recalcitrant to tact
but no one breaks
the protocol of fact
with passion torn from need

An old woman
smaller than her life
tows slowly by
on walker stilts
her passage past
my doorway lens
a paraphrase of
Zeno’s paradox
her days made brief
by space not time

Obituary calm
from room to room
despair elation
side by side
their vigil played
for Certainty
who’s hard to find
even Death
is dressed in doubt

Some moments more
a word a sign
the crumpled fear
that goes unsaid
this way the living
that the dead

And when I’m done
and sent along
they’ll change
the paper sheet
on which I sat
and that will be
the end of me
the end of that

10/25/94

Copyright 1994 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission

Feeling Uncertain About Your Masculinity? Support the Iraq War, Buy an SUV, and Hate Gays

Ruchira Paul has the details on this recent study out of Cornell University.

Not much new until Monday

I'll be travelling up to Newcastle tomorrow and then on to Edinburgh, so there won't be much on the blog until early next week.  Those posting comments on the Free Will thread, please be patient!  I will check my e-mail periodically, and so will be approving comments while on the road at various intervals.

John Martin Fischer on Free Will and Moral Responsibility: Where the Action Is

This is the first in a series of postings I've commissioned by leading philosophers on "where the action is" in various subfields of the discipline.  (I wrote about Nietzsche studies a couple of weeks ago.)  Hopefully these short essays will be illuminating for both graduate students interested in the particular subfield and philosophers working in other areas who want to keep abreast of developments outside their specialty.

Today, John Martin Fischer at the University of California at Riverside writes about "where the action is" on free will and moral responsibility.

=====================

The topics of free will and moral responsibility continue to be the subjects of lively and active debates in contemporary analytic philosophy.  Not surprisingly, no consensus about results has been reached (cf. the fallen angels in Milton's Paradise Lost), and, like much contemporary philosophy more broadly, there is a fairly wide range of methodologies.  Additionally, some philosophers approach these topics with an emphasis on ethical issues (such as moral responsibility, blameworthiness/praiseworthiness, judgments such as "ought/ought not", "right and wrong," and so forth), whereas others approach the topics from the perspective of metaphysics and/or philosophy of mind. 

There was a tremendous amount of work on the relationship between God's omnisicience and human freedom (and responsibility) about twenty-five years or so ago,  but this discussion has been relatively less lively recently (with certain exceptions).  The doctrine of Molinism has been a hot topic, especially in certain parts of Indiana.  According to Molinism, God can know prior to any providential activity on his part a set of "counterfactuals of freedom"--subjunctive conditionals about what human beings would freely do in various circumstances.  He combines this "middle knowledge" with his "natural knowledge" of the various possible initial situations to derive truths about what human beings would freely do, and he uses this information to guide his creation and providence.   There has been much debate about whether there can be true "counterfactuals of freedom," with Robert Adams leading the charge against this possibility.  The problem is that such conditionals would seem to need "metaphysical grounding," but if causal indeterminism is true, all that would seem to be grounded are "might-conditionals".  (Molina and his followers believe that causal determinism is incompatible with the relevant sort of freedom.)  Alfred Freddoso and Thomas Flint are contemporary exegetes and defenders of Molina.  Whereas there is much of interest in these debates, I believe they are orthogonal to the problem about the relationship between God's foreknowledge and human freedom.  In my view, Molinism provides a picture of how God could know about future actions of humans, and how he could use this knowledge in his providential activity.  But it does not provide an answer to the problem about the relationship between God's foreknowledge and human free action; rather, it simply presupposes some answer to this problem.  Indeed, Molina's favored solution to the latter problem was that of Aquinas, according to which God is outside of time (and thus has omniscience but not foreknowledge), and Flint's solution is Ockhamism.  Some philosophers (for example, Robert Kane in his otherwise excellent introductory book on free will in Oxford University Press's Fundamentals of Philosophy series) seem to think that Molinism is an answer to the problem about omniscience (or foreknowledge) and freedom, but this is a mistake. 

I think it might be interesting to explore whether any contemporary work on the nature of belief (in philosophy or perhaps the cognitive sciences, but probably not neuroscience!) might be employed to seek to make some progress on the traditional problem about the relationship between God's omniscience (foreknowledge) and human freedom.  This is not where the action is, but it is one place where I'd like to see some (more) action.  (For discussion, see the Prosblogion blog.)

There is some intriguing work on the nature of causal determinism.  J. Howard Sobel's book, Puzzles of the Will, has a subtle discussion of the various forms of determinism and how they might be thought to threaten human freedom.  He (in my humble and contentious opinion!) successfully shows that the Consequence Argument (or Basic Argument for Incompatibilism) can be formulated rigorously in various ways, not all of which require a modal principle such as the Principle of Transfer of Powerlessness (the principle that acts like a slingshot that can transmit powerlessness from one thing [the past] to another [the present] via the natural laws).  Some philosophers, notably Peter Van Inwagen and Ted Warfield, maintain that all valid versions of the Consequence Argument rely explicitly or implicitly on such a modal principle; I have been a persistent (they might say pesky!) critic of their view.  Carl Hoefer has a fascinating paper in which he points out that contemporary physics may not sit well with the basic intuitions that go into the Consequence Argument; in Hoefer's view, the intuitions that play a role in this argument (and buttress the Fixity of the Past and Natural Laws) come from common sense (and the A-Series picture of time), whereas physics presupposes the B-Series (without a moving now, as it were, and thus without past, present, and future). 

Recently philosophers have distinguished at least two importantly different ways in which causal determinism might threaten moral responsibility.  One way stems from the Consequence Argument.  If causal determinism rules out the sort of freedom that involves alternative possibilities, and this freedom is required for moral responsibility, then causal determinism is incompatible with moral responsibility.  Some compatibilists deny that the Consequence Argument successfully rules out the sort of freedom that involves genuine alternative possibilities.  Others contend that moral responsibility does not require this sort of freedom.  There are at least two different versions of this latter strategy.  Harry Frankfurt and I (and others) have contended that "Frankfurt-style" examples (first invented by John Locke) show that moral responsibility does not require alternative possibilities.  The debate about the Frankfurt-style examples still rages; a good recent collection is edited by David Widerker and Michael McKenna: Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities: Essays on the Importance of Alternative Possibilities (Ashgate).  David Widerker has been an important and influential critique of the strategy based on the Frankfurt-examples; there are rumors that he has a new paper in the works on Frankfurt-examples that might surprise many.  (Is it too much to hope that Widerker will defect to the side of the good guys?) Another strategy builds on the seminal work by Peter Strawson; there are important recent developments of Strawsonian approaches in Paul Russell's Freedom and Moral Sentiment and R. Jay Wallace's Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments. 

Another way in which causal determinism might threaten moral responsibility is directly and not via threatening to expunge the sort of freedom that involves alternative possibilities.  A whole range of different options are available here.  "Source incompatibilism" is the term typically used to refer to this family of worries; this view has it that if causal determinism is true, then an individual would not be the "source" of his choices and behavior in the way required by moral responsibility.  Important developments of this view are found in Robert Kane's The Significance of Choice and Derk Pereboom's Living Without Free Will.  Although there is still much interest in the Frankfurt-style examples and Strawsonian approaches, the "action" seems to have shifted somewhat in the direction of Source Incompatibilism recently.  (I cannot help noting--please excuse this--that in my 1982 Journal of Philosophy article, "Responsibility and Control," I identified Source Incompatibilism as a significant view with which compatibilists must come to terms; but of course in subsequent years I have sought to do just this, whereas such philosophers as Kane and Pereboom have developed and defended the position with considerable detail and skill.)

Timothy O'Connor's book, Persons and Causes, seeks to develop an agent-causal view.  It is the most sophisticated and comprehensive development of such a view of which I know.  In an interesting and important recent book, Libertarian Accounts of Free Action, Randolph Clarke surprisingly backs off from his former defense of agent-causal libertarianism; there is still hope that he will come all the way over to the compatibilist's side, although he remains unconvinced.

A major problem for any version of libertarianism--event-causal (Van Inwagen, Kane, Ekstrom) or agent-causal (O'Connor) is the problem of arbitrariness or luck.  Much recent work has addressed this set of problems, and Alfred Mele has written a book on this subject forthcoming in early 2006 with Oxford University Press.  I hope he solves the problem, because I believe that moral responsibility should not "hang on a thread"--should not depend on whether the conditionals that link past to present in physics have associated with them 100% probabilities or merely 99.9% probabilities!  Since I believe our most basic views about ourselves as free and responsible should not hang on a thread (at least a thread of this sort), I believe that these views should be resilient with respect to a discovery that causal determinism were true; also, they should be equally resilient with respect to a discovery that causal indeterminism (of certain sorts) were true.  So good luck, Al--no pun intended!

Various important challenges have been raised to our views of ourselves as robustly free and responsible, including Galen Strawson's Freedom and Belief, Saul Smilansky's Freedom and Illusion, and Derk Pereboom's Living Without Free Will.  (One can imagine a whole series of Living Without X books: Living Without Ethics, Living Without Knowledge, Living Without Aesthetics, and so forth…)

There is much intriguing and suggestive work employing somewhat nontraditional methodologies.  Neurophilosophers such as the Churchlands have written recently about freedom and responsibility.  Also, there is a booming industry in "experimental philosophy" which seeks (among other things) to clarify and establish what people actually believe about the range of issues pertaining to freedom and responsibility.  I think that progress in the future on free will and moral responsibility will most likely be made through a broad-minded and eclectic approach whereby one takes insights from both traditional methodologies and also the developing informational sciences, psychology, and neuroscience.  I think it is misguided and not fruitful to brush aside centuries of thought on these ideas as my friend Daniel Dennett does in his intelligent, lively but in my view disappointing book, Freedom Evolves.  Similarly, we need to be open to the insights potentially available through the work of neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers employing these intellectual tools.

I shall end this (too long but also obviously too short) post with my puzzlement over a "splinter" in the work on free will/moral responsibility.  Some theories are called "normative" accounts (Watson, Wolf, Wallace, Benson, et. al.), whereas others are called "metaphysical" (Van Inwagen, Ginet, Fischer and Ravizza, O'Connor, Clarke, et. al.)  It is striking to me that the "normative" group is highly miscellaneous; the specific ways in which they are "normative" are very different, and it would be useful to get a clearer understanding of the distinction.  I doubt that it is as sharp or important as some suppose.  The difference may be as much a matter of "conversational networks" (as Manuel Vargas has pointed out to me) than content.

I should note that much of interest had to be omitted from this discussion--I'm sorry.  I welcome you all to the discussions at "The Garden of Forking Paths."

(Please note that comments may take awhile to appear.)

Philosopher/Soldier's Suicide in Iraq

Interesting, albeit tragic, story here; an excerpt:

One hot, dusty day in June, Col. Ted Westhusing was found dead in a trailer at a military base near the Baghdad airport, a single gunshot wound to the head.

The Army would conclude that he committed suicide with his service pistol. At the time, he was the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq....

Col. Westhusing was no ordinary officer. He was one of the Army's leading scholars of military ethics, a full professor at West Point who volunteered to serve in Iraq to be able to better teach his students. He had a doctorate in philosophy; his dissertation was an extended meditation on the meaning of honor.

So it was only natural that Westhusing acted when he learned of possible corruption by U.S. contractors in Iraq. A few weeks before he died, Westhusing received an anonymous complaint that a private security company he oversaw had cheated the U.S. government and committed human rights violations. Westhusing confronted the contractor and reported the concerns to superiors, who launched an investigation.

In e-mails to his family, Westhusing seemed especially upset by one conclusion he had reached: that traditional military values such as duty, honor and country had been replaced by profit motives in Iraq, where the U.S. had come to rely heavily on contractors for jobs once done by the military....

In his 352-page dissertation, Westhusing discussed the ethics of war, focusing on examples of military honor from Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee to the Israeli army. It is a dense, searching and sometimes personal effort to define what, exactly, constitutes virtuous conduct in the context of the modern U.S. military.

"Born to be a warrior, I desire these answers not just for philosophical reasons, but for self-knowledge," he wrote in the opening pages....

In January, Westhusing began work on what the Pentagon considered the most important mission in Iraq: training Iraqi forces to take over security duties from U.S. troops.

Westhusing's task was to oversee a private security company, Virginia-based USIS, which had contracts worth $79 million to train a corps of Iraqi police to conduct special operations.

In March, Gen. David Petraeus, commanding officer of the Iraqi training mission, praised Westhusing's performance, saying he had exceeded "lofty expectations."

"Thanks much, sir, but we can do much better and will," Westhusing wrote back, according to a copy of the Army investigation of his death that was obtained by The Times.

In April, his mood seemed to have darkened. He worried over delays in training one of the police battalions.

Then, in May, Westhusing received an anonymous four-page letter that contained detailed allegations of wrongdoing by USIS.

The writer accused USIS of deliberately shorting the government on the number of trainers to increase its profit margin. More seriously, the writer detailed two incidents in which USIS contractors allegedly had witnessed or participated in the killing of Iraqis.

A USIS contractor accompanied Iraqi police trainees during the assault on Fallouja last November and later boasted about the number of insurgents he had killed, the letter says. Private security contractors are not allowed to conduct offensive operations.

In a second incident, the letter says, a USIS employee saw Iraqi police trainees kill two innocent Iraqi civilians, then covered it up. A USIS manager "did not want it reported because he thought it would put his contract at risk."

Westhusing reported the allegations to his superiors but told one of them, Gen. Joseph Fil, that he believed USIS was complying with the terms of its contract.

U.S. officials investigated and found "no contractual violations," an Army spokesman said. Bill Winter, a USIS spokesman, said the investigation "found these allegations to be unfounded."

However, several U.S. officials said inquiries on USIS were ongoing. One U.S. military official, who, like others, requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case, said the inquiries had turned up problems, but nothing to support the more serious charges of human rights violations....

The letter shook Westhusing, who felt personally implicated by accusations that he was too friendly with USIS management, according to an e-mail in the report....

The colonel began to complain to colleagues about "his dislike of the contractors," who, he said, "were paid too much money by the government," according to one captain....

Most of the [suicide] letter is a wrenching account of a struggle for honor in a strange land.

"I cannot support a msn [mission] that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars. I am sullied," it says. "I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored.

"Death before being dishonored any more."

A psychologist reviewed Westhusing's e-mails and interviewed colleagues. She concluded that the anonymous letter had been the "most difficult and probably most painful stressor."

She said that Westhusing had placed too much pressure on himself to succeed and that he was unusually rigid in his thinking. Westhusing struggled with the idea that monetary values could outweigh moral ones in war. This, she said, was a flaw.

"Despite his intelligence, his ability to grasp the idea that profit is an important goal for people working in the private sector was surprisingly limited," wrote Lt. Col. Lisa Breitenbach. "He could not shift his mind-set from the military notion of completing a mission irrespective of cost, nor could he change his belief that doing the right thing because it was the right thing to do should be the sole motivator for businesses."

(Thanks to Brendan Hogan for the pointer.)

Excerpts from NY Times Interview with Tookie Williams

Here.  Williams was executed earlier today, providing temporary satisfaction to all those with insatiable bloodlust.  A number of his remarks in this interview, two weeks ago, are rather interesting:

On His Years as a Crip:
"I have a despicable background. I was a criminal. I was a co-founder of the Crips. I was a nihilist."

On His Transformation:
"People forget that redemption is tailor-made for the wretched."

On the Case Against Him:
"I always ask the question: Can a black man in America receive justice? I can say to you or anybody else that the answer is absolutely no. There’s a myriad of things that bring me to this conclusion — prosecutorial misconduct, the biased selection of juries, the issues of informants, the exclusion of exculpatory evidence, illegal interrogation of witnesses. It’s commonplace. It’s deeply ingrained in the California criminal justice system."

On His Work With Children:
"They can empathize with me. I pretty much experienced all the madness they’re going through."

On Death Row:
"I’ve never seen a millionaire here."

"The longer I sit in this animalistic cage, the more human I become. I’ve learned not to allow the negative ambience to control me. I’ve risen above all of that, like a phoenix, a black phoenix."

On the Prospect of Execution:
"They have the audacity to ask, 'Do I want a last meal?' Absolutely not. 'Do I want anyone present?' Absolutely not. 'Do I want a preacher?' Absolutely not. I want nothing from this institution."

New Philosophers' Carnival is...

...here.

New Ethics Blog by Bowling Green Grad Students

Here.

Rutgers's Hawthorne Accepts Waynflete Chair at Oxford

John Hawthorne (metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language and mind, Leibniz) at Rutgers University at New Brunswick has accepted the offer of the Waynflete Chair in Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford University.  He may still maintain some kind of visiting relationship with Rutgers, though that has not yet been formalized.

This concludes a rather remarkable "recovery" for Oxford which, for a time in the 1990s, often found its Chairs empty or filled only for short periods with faculty near retirement.  Now the Waynflete Chair and the Wykeham Chair in Logic (held by Timothy Williamson) are staffed by philosophers in their 40s; Martin Davies, in his 50s, is returning from the ANU to take up the Wilde Chair in Mental Philosophy; and John Broome, also in his 50s, holds the White's Chair of Moral Philosophy.  The only vacant Chair on the philosophy faculty right now is the Chair in Ancient Philosophy, from which Michael Frede has recently retired. 

London Times: Israel Preparing for Attack on Iran

Story here; an excerpt:

ISRAEL’S armed forces have been ordered by Ariel Sharon, the prime minister, to be ready by the end of March for possible strikes on secret uranium enrichment sites in Iran, military sources have revealed.

The order came after Israeli intelligence warned the government that Iran was operating enrichment facilities, believed to be small and concealed in civilian locations.

Iran’s stand-off with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) over nuclear inspections and aggressive rhetoric from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, who said last week that Israel should be moved to Europe, are causing mounting concern.

The crisis is set to come to a head in early March, when Mohamed El-Baradei, the head of the IAEA, will present his next report on Iran. El-Baradei, who received the Nobel peace prize yesterday, warned that the world was “losing patience” with Iran....

Defence sources in Israel believe the end of March to be the “point of no return” after which Iran will have the technical expertise to enrich uranium in sufficient quantities to build a nuclear warhead in two to four years.

“Israel — and not only Israel — cannot accept a nuclear Iran,” Sharon warned recently. “We have the ability to deal with this and we’re making all the necessary preparations to be ready for such a situation.”

The order to prepare for a possible attack went through the Israeli defence ministry to the chief of staff. Sources inside special forces command confirmed that “G” readiness — the highest stage — for an operation was announced last week....

Cross-border operations and signal intelligence from a base established by the Israelis in northern Iraq are said to have identified a number of Iranian uranium enrichment sites unknown to the the IAEA....

If a military operation is approved, Israel will use air and ground forces against several nuclear targets in the hope of stalling Tehran’s nuclear programme for years, according to Israeli military sources.

It is believed Israel would call on its top special forces brigade, Unit 262 — the equivalent of the SAS — and the F-15I strategic 69 Squadron, which can strike Iran and return to Israel without refuelling.

“If we opt for the military strike,” said a source, “it must be not less than 100% successful. It will resemble the destruction of the Egyptian air force in three hours in June 1967.”

Aharon Zeevi Farkash, the Israeli military intelligence chief, stepped up the pressure on Iran this month when he warned Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, that “if by the end of March the international community is unable to refer the Iranian issue to the United Nations security council, then we can say the international effort has run its course”....

Russia last week signed an estimated $1 billion contract — its largest since 2000 — to sell Iran advanced Tor-M1 systems capable of destroying guided missiles and laser-guided bombs from aircraft.

“Once the Iranians get the Tor-M1, it will make our life much more difficult,” said an Israeli air force source. “The installation of this system can be relatively quick and we can’t waste time on this one.”

The date set for possible Israeli strikes on Iran also coincides with Israel’s general election on March 28, prompting speculation that Sharon may be sabre-rattling for votes.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the frontrunner to lead Likud into the elections, said that if Sharon did not act against Iran, “then when I form the new Israeli government, we’ll do what we did in the past against Saddam’s reactor, which gave us 20 years of tranquillity”.

University of Oregon Fails to Back Professor Threatened with Legal Action Over Her Scholarship

Details here.

And now for a different take on Christmas...

...here.

Oklahoma Minister: "This country is bankrupt"

An excerpt:

I'm tired of people thinking that because I'm a Christian, I must be a supporter of President Bush, or that because I favor civil rights and gay rights I must not be a person of faith. I'm tired of people saying that I can't support the troops but oppose the war -- I heard that when I was your age, when the Vietnam war was raging. We knew that that war was wrong, and you know that this war is wrong -- the only question is how many people are going to die before these make-believe Christians are removed from power?

This country is bankrupt. The war is morally bankrupt. The claim of this administration to be Christian is bankrupt. And the only people who can turn things around are people like you -- young people who are just beginning to wake up to what is happening to them.It's your country to take back. It's your faith to take back. It's your future to take back.

Don't be afraid to speak out. Don't back down when your friends begin to tell you that the cause is righteous and that the flag should be wrapped around the cross, while the rest of us keep our mouths shut. Real Christians take chances for peace. So do real Jews, and real Muslims, and real Hindus, and real Buddhists -- so do all the faith traditions of the world at their heart believe one thing: life is precious. Every human being is precious. Arrogance is the opposite of faith. Greed is the opposite of charity. And believing that one has never made a mistake is the mark of a deluded man, not a man of faith.

(Thanks to Lloyd Reisman for the pointer.)

"Beneficial Retirement" of Senior Philosophers

Moral philosopher Saul Smilansky at Haifa University in Israel writes with the following interesting remarks:

I thought that you might be interested in a topic of concern to our profession, that I've recently raised in a short paper in Ratio called "The Paradox of Beneficial Retirement".

It should be easiest to explain the issue by thinking about philosophical jobs: in every junior jobs search we've had in my department, we have had applicants in double figures. Half aren't very good, and maybe 3-4 will get a job in another research university in Israel (there are just 5 of those!). This means that every few years a number of promising young
philosophers won't find good jobs. And some potentially excellent candidates will not pursue their studies even up to that level, knowing that "few die and none retire".

But at the same time there are in every department philosophers who are not as good, and are closer to retirement.  Were they to leave their jobs earlier, those younger philosophers would be able to get in, to the benefit of the department, the students and the profession. I don't know the American scene very well (my only lengthy presence in the US as an adult was two years ago during a sabbatical at Rutgers, whose graduates should do very well in the job market), but I suspect that - apart from the numbers, of course - the situation is similar.

My argument is an "argument from integrity", suggesting that professionals who are below average (the left side of the bell curve) should consider leaving their profession, since (given certain plausible assumptions) if they leave, they are very likely to be replaced by someone
better than themselves.

Perhaps you will be interested in airing this "dark secret" of our profession.

It has recently been taken up in the economics blog "marginal revolution" (though most of the economists who responded did not get the argument and were uninterested in the philosophical and moral aspects, and many were simply nasty. It's an interesting sociological document.)

The situation in the U.S. isn't always as stark--partly because the awarding of lines isn't always tied to retirements, and partly because a retirement doesn't necessarily guarantee a line (sometimes the "line" is given to another unit).  But I wonder what philosophers think of the issue raised by Professor Smilansky?

Some Realism about Supreme Court Justices

Given the extraordinary public ignorance about what it is judges really do, these points really can't be made often enough.  A litigation partner with one of the nation's leading law firms writes:

I read your recent posts on the Alito nomination. For 30 years now I have litigated business cases.  I also handle a significant number of appeals in both the federal and state systems.  And, not unusually, I have acquaintances and friends who are state and federal trial and appellate judges.   I mention that because I wonder at the sanity of those who think that it is realistically possible in close and controversial cases on issues of public import (and most Supreme Court cases are precisely that or they wouldn't have had cert granted) to ignore your own predilections and beliefs. In fact, it is just such cases that seem to call for a leap of faith or logic at some critical point; the means to accomplish that leap often stems from personal beliefs. It is so obvious to those of us who live in the courtroom that it is hardly worth discussion. No single fact or circumstance is more important than to know the judge who will decide the case.  To take another example, every firm that I know of with a significant Supreme Court practice brings to bear on a Supreme Court brief and argument the views of former clerks to as many current Justices as possible. There is only one reason to do that, and it is not to consider the precedents or even "super precedents." (I apparently missed the law school course on those.)  Roe sadly and inevitably gets all the attention in Supreme Court nominations.  And it may well be that the unique pressure of the nomination process leads even a Justice Alito to be wary of reversing Roe outright and soon.  But it will be for that reason that he does not do so, not because he really believes that a Justice has no ability to bring to bear his or her personal views.  And even if they are disguised in the Roe context, his personal views will surely come out in many other contexts that escape close Senate scrutiny during the hearing process.  (In that regard, the ability of a judge to decide cases without bringing his personal views to bear in the every day criminal or immigration or business case is almost entirely irrelevant to this issue; it is easy to keep a steady hand on the tiller when you don't much care about the destination).

Friday Poem: "I Have Served My Country"

I Have Served My Country

I have served my country daily in the faithfulness of folly
Weighed the hard choices which I was careful not to make
Offering my willing cowardice in the face of public nonsense
Layering abstinence and sarcasm in its wake

Surreptitiously declining to honor rituals of polity
Vagrant on Election Day generally in disregard of fealty
Harboring the conviction that all our rules are rancid
And even at the risk of sadness keeping sour truth at hand

The times that I was harmless although few are thorough
The days I overslept and hardly meddled so many
And many times I cleaned my  plate gaily gladly
Thankful for the luxury of being left alone

Out of complexity of principle I turn my back on beggars
And although somewhat ambivalent sneer aloud at money
Nor have I permitted piety to trespass on my thinking
But have listened to the sermonizers with mind averted

And tolerate dull statesmen those most pernicious poseurs
Dreaming like every condemned man to secretly outlive them
All in all I’ve led a blameless life if life you’d call it
And am ready if they need me to hide where they’ll not find me

9/11-9/13, 9/24, 12/5/98, 5/20, 12/19-20, 12/24-12/26/99

Copyright 1999 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Dershowitz v. Chomsky at Harvard

Amusing account of their recent "debate" here (if you read the account, you'll see why "debate" is in quotes--only one side was actually debating, it appears).  I've opened comments, for anyone else who has a first-person account to offer.

UPDATE:  You can view the debate itself here.

The Kansas Taliban Get Violent

Paul Mirecki is the University of Kansas religion professor who proposed a course on Intelligent Design as "mythology," which is actually about the nicest thing one can say about new-fangled creationism.  This, in itself, generated controversy with the homegrown theocrats, but matters got worse when a derisive e-mail about fundamentalists sent by Mirecki to an atheists and agnostics listserve surfaced.  Professor Mirecki has since been physically attacked by "defenders of the faith," and, as a consequence of the general political outcry about the course and Professor Mireckie's remarks, his course has been cancelled, which tells you everything you need to know about academic freedom at the University of Kansas.  Pharyngula has comments and links here, including the following remarkable statement by a Republican state senator in Kansas:  "We have to set a standard that it’s not culturally acceptable to mock Christianity in America."

Gee, why settle for "not culturally acceptable"?  Why not go for "not legally permissible"?  Or perhaps "punishable by stoning"? 

And that's the state of nascent fascist theocracy in Kansas in 2005.

UPDATE:  This story says Professor Mirecki, not the University, cancelled the class, though one still wonders what pressures may have been brought to bear on the decision.

The "Cut and Run" U.S. Congress

Strong message, as usual, from our fine Congressman in Austin, Lloyd Doggett:

Today, the U.S. House of Representatives voted on the Tax Reconciliation Bill (H.R. 4297). Under this misguided bill the wealthiest top 0.2% of households, those making more than $1,000,000, would be awarded 40% of the tax breaks. Over my opposition, this bill passed the House by a vote of 234 to 197. As noted below in the speech I gave on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, it is our children and grandchildren who will bear a great burden in paying for these giveaways. My speech can be viewed online at www.house.gov/doggett/Taxrecon.wmv

Rep. Lloyd Doggett, "The GOP 'Cut & Run Congress,'" December 8, 2005

When this Administration took over the White House, the United States enjoyed a multi-billion dollar budget surplus. But a Republican-controlled Washington proved unable to "stay the course." Instead, our public surplus has been surrendered - surrendered to special interests, and their corrupt coterie of cronies.

Every time Big Oil, or Halliburton, or some other corporation, shifts its jobs or profits offshore and asks for yet another tax break, this Congress waves the white flag of surrender. The commitment to any fiscal discipline is in full retreat. Now we have huge deficits as far as the eye can see.

At a time of war, Republicans demand no sacrifice from those at the top, no sacrifice from multinational corporations, which have refined creative tax dodging into an art, but they demand those at the bottom of the ladder sacrifice their all. Under this bill, the few individuals making over a million dollars each year are rewarded with an average of over $50,000 in tax breaks- so these few get another fancy foreign car added to their fleet.

But for the many earning up to $40,000 a year, and that is more than half of Americans, this bill provides on average $30- maybe one tank of gas.

Once again, America sees a true Republican Christmas is one where only the silk stockings get stuffed. And when the bill for the lavish Republican Christmas giveaways comes due, who pays? Our children. Most of the cost burden of these tax breaks is shifted to our children and grandchildren in the form of spiraling national debt.

But a part of the $56 billion dollar cost of today's legislation is paid for by cuts to child support enforcement, cuts to assistance to abused and neglected children, cuts to child care, and cuts to student financial assistance. The tax writing body in this chamber has truly become the "Committee of Greedy Ways and Shifty Means." And this will be remembered as the "Cut and Run" Congress: cutting taxes greatly for the few, and running trillion dollar deficits for the rest of us.

Because of stunts like this, the U.S. is now widely, and correctly, viewed not as a democracy but a plutocracy.  (You can also understand why the Houston-area fascist Tom DeLay was so keen to try to redistrict Lloyd Doggett out of office--but it didn't work!)

Pinter's Nobel Lecture

Here; an excerpt:

The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law. The invasion was an arbitrary military action inspired by a series of lies upon lies and gross manipulation of the media and therefore of the public; an act intended to consolidate American military and economic control of the Middle East masquerading as a last resort all other justifications having failed to justify themselves as liberation. A formidable assertion of military force responsible for the death and mutilation of thousands and thousands of innocent people.

We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it 'bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East'.

How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice. But Bush has been clever. He has not ratified the International Criminal Court of Justice. Therefore if any American soldier or for that matter politician finds himself in the dock Bush has warned that he will send in the marines. But Tony Blair has ratified the Court and is therefore available for prosecution. We can let the Court have his address if they're interested. It is Number 10, Downing Street, London.

Death in this context is irrelevant. Both Bush and Blair place death well away on the back burner. At least 100,000 Iraqis were killed by American bombs and missiles before the Iraq insurgency began. These people are of no moment. Their deaths don't exist. They are blank. They are not even recorded as being dead. 'We don't do body counts,' said the American general Tommy Franks.

Early in the invasion there was a photograph published on the front page of British newspapers of Tony Blair kissing the cheek of a little Iraqi boy. 'A grateful child,' said the caption. A few days later there was a story and photograph, on an inside page, of another four-year-old boy with no arms. His family had been blown up by a missile. He was the only survivor. 'When do I get my arms back?' he asked. The story was dropped. Well, Tony Blair wasn't holding him in his arms, nor the body of any other mutilated child, nor the body of any bloody corpse. Blood is dirty. It dirties your shirt and tie when you're making a sincere speech on television.

The 2,000 American dead are an embarrassment. They are transported to their graves in the dark. Funerals are unobtrusive, out of harm's way. The mutilated rot in their beds, some for the rest of their lives. So the dead and the mutilated both rot, in different kinds of graves.

Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, 'I'm Explaining a Few Things':

And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children's blood.

Jackals that the jackals would despise
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate.

Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives.

Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull's eye of your hearts.

And you will ask: why doesn't his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land.

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!*

Let me make it quite clear that in quoting from Neruda's poem I am in no way comparing Republican Spain to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians.

I have said earlier that the United States is now totally frank about putting its cards on the table. That is the case. Its official declared policy is now defined as 'full spectrum dominance'. That is not my term, it is theirs. 'Full spectrum dominance' means control of land, sea, air and space and all attendant resources.

The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries, with the honourable exception of Sweden, of course. We don't quite know how they got there but they are there all right.

The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning. It is developing new systems of nuclear force, known as bunker busters. The British, ever cooperative, are intending to replace their own nuclear missile, Trident. Who, I wonder, are they aiming at? Osama bin Laden? You? Me? Joe Dokes? China? Paris? Who knows? What we do know is that this infantile insanity the possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons is at the heart of present American political philosophy. We must remind ourselves that the United States is on a permanent military footing and shows no sign of relaxing it.

Many thousands, if not millions, of people in the United States itself are demonstrably sickened, shamed and angered by their government's actions, but as things stand they are not a coherent political force yet. But the anxiety, uncertainty and fear which we can see growing daily in the United States is unlikely to diminish.

I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers but I would like to volunteer for the job myself. I propose the following short address which he can make on television to the nation. I see him grave, hair carefully combed, serious, winning, sincere, often beguiling, sometimes employing a wry smile, curiously attractive, a man's man.

'God is good. God is great. God is good. My God is good. Bin Laden's God is bad. His is a bad God. Saddam's God was bad, except he didn't have one. He was a barbarian. We are not barbarians. We don't chop people's heads off. We believe in freedom. So does God. I am not a barbarian. I am the democratically elected leader of a freedom-loving democracy. We are a compassionate society. We give compassionate electrocution and compassionate lethal injection. We are a great nation. I am not a dictator. He is. I am not a barbarian. He is. And he is. They all are. I possess moral authority. You see this fist? This is my moral authority. And don't you forget it.'

...

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us the dignity of man.

Chinese Government Blocking All Typepad Accounts

I received the following e-mail from a Chinese reader:

I am a student of China University of Politics & Law , and a faithful reader of your "Brian Leiter Reports ".  Your research in legal theory & Philosophy ,especially in American Legal Realism & Nietzsche ,was often cited in some Chinese scholars' essays.

But since July ,2005 ,  the Typedpad was blocked by the Chinese Government . I don’t know much about network , I can only check the google ‘s “cached” to know what’s new in your Blog.

I don’t mean to critized our government or our Party ：） , though I feel very upset and inconvenient. There are many readers of “ Leiter Reports” in China . I believe they have the same feeling.

I write this letter to tell you the situation. I will be very happy to get your reply .  At last , I am sorry about my poor English writing , like many Chinese students , i don’t get enough training in our English course :)

(My correspondent's English is a lot better than my Chinese!  When you consider how difficult English is, and how different Chinese is, I am always impressed by the quality of the English from correspondents in China.)

Comments are open; do any tech-savvy readers have ideas?  I know nothing about how "blocking" works and whether the blocks can be evaded.