Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Habeas Corpus, the Rule of Law and the Risk of Tyranny

This cuts to the heart of why Bush & co. are so dangerous domestically (they are dangerous internationally for quite obvious reasons):

Habeas corpus is the greatest protection Americans have against a police state. Habeas corpus ensures that Americans can only be detained by law. They must be charged with offenses, given access to attorneys, and brought to trial. Habeas corpus prevents the despotic practice of picking up a person and holding him indefinitely.

President Bush claims the power to set aside habeas corpus and to dispense with warrants for arrest and with procedures that guarantee court appearance and trial without undue delay. Today in the US, the executive branch claims the power to arrest a citizen on its own initiative and hold the citizen indefinitely. Thus, Americans are no longer protected from arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention.

These new "seize and hold" powers strip the accused of the protective aspects of law and give rein to selectivity and arbitrariness. No warrant is required for arrest, no charges have to be presented before a judge, and no case has to be put before a jury. As the police are unaccountable, whoever is selected for arrest is at the mercy of arbitrariness.

The judiciary has to some extent defended habeas corpus against Bush's attack, but the protection that the principle offers against arbitrary seizure and detention has been breeched. Whether courts can fully restore habeas corpus or whether it continues in weakened form or passes by the wayside remains to be determined....

In times before our own when people were properly educated, they understood the injustices that caused the English Parliament to pass the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 prohibiting the arbitrary powers that are now being claimed for the executive branch in the US....

The [long-standing legal and moral] prohibition against physical torture...held until he US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. As video, photographic, and testimonial evidence make clear, the US military has been torturing large numbers of people in its Iraq prisons and in its prison compound at Guantanamo, Cuba. Most of the detainees were people picked up in the equivalent of KGB Stalin-era street sweeps. Having no idea who the detainees are and pressured to produce results, torture was applied to coerce confessions.

Everyone is disturbed about this barbaric and illegal practice except the Bush administration. In an amendment to a $440 billion defense budget bill last Wednesday, the US Senate voted 90 to 9 to ban "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" of anyone in US government custody. President Bush responded to the Senate's will by repeating his earlier threat to veto the bill. Allow me to torture, demands Bush of the Senate, or you will be guilty of delaying the military's budget during wartime. Bush is threatening the Senate with blame for the deaths of US soldiers who will die because they don't get their body armor or humvee armor in time.

It will be a short step from torturing detainees abroad to torturing the accused in US jails and prisons.

The attorney-client privilege, another great achievement, has been breeched by the Lynne Stewart case. As the attorney for a terrorist, Stewart represented her client in ways disapproved by prosecutors. Stewart was indicted, tried, and convicted of providing material support to terrorists.

Stewart's indictment sends a message to attorneys not to represent too dutifully or aggressively clients who are unpopular or demonized. Initially, this category may be limited to terrorists. However, once the attorney-client privilege is breeched, any attorney who gets too much in the way of a prosecutor's case may experience retribution. The intimidation factor can result in an attorney presenting a weak defense. It can even result in attorneys doing as the Benthamite US Department of Justice (sic) desires and helping to convict their client.

In the Anglo-American legal tradition, law is a shield of the accused. This is necessary in order to protect the innocent. The accused is innocent until he is proven guilty in an open court. There are no secret tribunals, no torture, and no show trials.

Outside the Anglo-American legal tradition, law is a weapon of the state. It may be used with careful restraint, as in Europe today, or it may be used to destroy opponents or rivals as in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

When the protective features of the law are removed, law becomes a weapon. Habeas corpus, due process, the attorney-client privilege, no crime without intent, and prohibitions against torture and ex post facto laws are the protective features that shield the accused. These protective features are being removed by zealotry in the "war against terrorism."

50% of Americans: Impeach Bush if he Lied

Details here; an excerpt:

The poll found that 50% agreed with the statement:

    "If President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should consider holding him accountable by impeaching him."

    44% disagreed, and 6% said they didn't know or declined to answer. The poll has a +/- 3.1% margin of error.

    Those who agreed with the statement were also more passionate: 39% strongly agreed, while 30% strongly disagreed.

    "The results of this poll are truly astonishing," said AfterDowningStreet.org co-founder Bob Fertik. "Bush's record-low approval ratings tell just half of the story, which is how much Americans oppose Bush's policies on Iraq and other issues. But this poll tells the other half of the story - that a solid plurality of Americans want Congress to consider removing Bush from the White House."

    Responses varied by political party affiliation: 72% of Democrats favored impeachment, compared to 56% of Independents and 20% of Republicans....

    Majorities favored impeachment in the Northeast (53%), West (51%), and even the South (50%).

    The Ipsos poll shows a dramatic transformation in support for Bush's impeachment since late June. (This is only the second poll that has asked Americans about their support for impeaching Bush in 2005, despite his record-low approval ratings.) The Zogby poll conducted June 27-29 of 905 likely voters found that 42% agreed and 50% disagreed with a statement virtually identical to the one used by Ipsos.

Keith Burgess-Jackson vs. "Philosophy of Biology" Blog!

(ORIGINALLY POSTED October 14, 2005)

As usual, Keith Burgess-Jackson (hereafter "KBJ"), the oddest man with a PhD in philosophy and a blog is being sliced and diced for one of his recent irrational postings. 

I am often asked, "Who is KBJ?"  I'll tell you what I know. 

KBJ teaches philosophy at the University of Texas at Arlington (Arlington is near Dallas, and UTA is one of the dozen or so branches of the UT system, mostly focused on undergraduate education) and he has a far right blog called "Anal Philosopher" (which, he admits, gets a substantial portion of its visits from people googling for anal sex sites!).  I know of him mainly because every week or two, he goes beserk at my expense:  he defames and insults me, makes scurrilous allegations (usually involving fictional misdeeds and incidents), and so on.  Invariably, someone sends me a link asking, "What's wrong with this guy?  Do you know him?"  (Actually, most of the queries are far ruder about KBJ than this, but you get the idea.)  I don't know him, except via some e-mail, though I finally stopped corresponding with him, since it's clear he does not occupy the space of reasons (I even added him finally to my list of blocked senders--he is, in many ways, worse than spam).  Here's what I do know about him:

  *KBJ is, by his own admission, desperate for attention.  Early on, KBJ had nothing but nice words for my blog.  My greatest sin, apparently, was never to have linked to him in the first year or so after he started his blog.  The reasons I didn't link to him are aptly described by Brian Weatherson (Philosophy, Cornell), who did note the arrival of KBJ's blog two years ago with the following understated assessment:  "I should warn that a large chunk of it doesn't seem to be that good...."  Indeed.  The folks at Crooked Timber have had fun in the past with what passes for "argument" at KBJ's site, for example, here and here.  And as another blogger noted, KBJ has a certain tendency towards "unembarrassed display[s] of irrationality."   It's hard, in short, to find stuff on his blog that one would want to call to the attention of philosophers and scholars, let alone rational, humane and cosmopolitan readers.   

*In any case, KBJ didn't cope too well with Professor Weatherson's understated assessment, and replied (in classic KBJ fashion) as follows:

Some idiot named Brian Weatherson commented early on...that there wasn’t much philosophy (or good philosophy) on my site. He must not know how to read.   

This is par for the course for KBJ:  he dismisses, with contempt, individuals who are, in every tangible and intangible respect, his betters, intellectually and otherwise.  (See, too, his treatment of R.A. Duff, a first-rate philosopher of criminal law whom KBJ dismisses as "obtuse" and "intellectually dishonest" [because he didn't give a favorable review to some of KBJ's work].  By contrast, he merely dismisses me as a "disgrace," a "buffoon," a "nut" and the like.  [He's not much nicer to Paul Krugman:  e.g., here or here or here or here and on and on.]  Someone prone to armchair psychology--not me, of course!--might surmise that the defense mechanism called "projection" explains a good many of these outbursts.  On the other hand, if, as KBJ informs us, "The degree to which [one is] attacked is the degree to which [one is] respected (or feared)," then KBJ must either worship me or be utterly terrified!  [I'm joking, of course:  KBJ is the most psychologically transparent blogger I've ever seen.])

Rosenberg Review of "Future for Philosophy"

Jay Rosenberg (Philosophy, North Carolina) had an interesting review of The Future for Philosophy in last week's TLS.  If anyone knows of an on-line copy of it, I'd like to link to it, since Professor Rosenberg raises a number of issues that might be fun to discuss with readers.  Thanks.

"Intelligent Design IS Creationism"

The saga continues.

The Unconstitutionality of Teaching Intelligent Design Creationism

This will, undoubtedly, be an important and much-discussed contribution to resisting the efforts of the new-fangled creationists to wreck science education in the public schools.  The authors have all worked extensively on these issues, and Steven Gey will be well-known to law readers as one of the nation's leading scholars of the First Amendment.

European Court Refuses to Extradite Terror Suspect to Nation that Violates Rights

The court is in The Netherlands and the country is the United States:

A Dutch court on Wednesday blocked the extradition of a Dutch terror suspect to the United States, saying his legal rights in U.S. custody could not be guaranteed.

The man, who is of Egyptian descent and was identified only by his initials M. A., is wanted on charges of fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud, apparently to help the al-Qaida terrorist network. He has been in custody in the Netherlands for around eight months.

The ruling by the Hague District Court said the suspect's "fundamental right" of unlimited access to a defense lawyer and immediate access to a judge may be compromised in the United States.

Last month, the court sought guarantees from U.S. prosecutors that the detainee would be afforded those basic rights if he were extradited. In Wednesday's ruling, it rejected a U.S. submission that "the United States views such a request as unwarranted and unnecessary...."

"This ruling is unique in Dutch legal history. Never before has a judge ruled that an extradition to the United States could not take place because the rights of a defendant could not be guaranteed," [defense attorney] Nooitgedagt said.

Of course, never before in recent U.S. history has the nation been ruled by leaders with such contempt for the rule of law.

Harold Pinter

Among the nice things about Harold Pinter receiving the Noble Prize in Literature is that he is a scathing critic of U.S. imperialism, whose politics will, happily, garner even more attention.

Why is there a Nobel Prize in Economics?

ORIGINALLY POSTED ON OCTOBER 1, 2003. (And for more on why the "Nobel Prize" in Economics is not really a Nobel Prize, see here. And for a different view on economics as "science," see here.)

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

Next week, the Swedish Academy starts handing out Nobel Prizes, which guarantees for the recipients a wave of international publicity and attention. Since the late 1960s, economics has been included among the fields for which the Prize is given. And without a doubt, the field of economics has gotten a lot of mileage out of the fact that it is the only social science field in which there is a Nobel Prize, which puts economics right alongside real sciences like physics and chemistry.

Economists tend to take the scientific status of their field for granted, while those outside the field are more skeptical. There's a large popular literature, of course, on the preposterously bad track record of predictions by economists (the December 2, 1996 essay by John Cassidy in The New Yorker may be the best-known, though it's not, as far as I can tell, on-line), but philosophers (notably Daniel Hausman at Wisconsin and Alexander Rosenberg at Duke) have developed substantial theoretical accounts of the problems that afflict economics and that account for the poor predictive track record.

A good sampling is found in Hausman's contribution to SEP on philosophy of economics. Hausman there writes, for example, regarding Milton Friedman's famous defense of unrealistic assumptions in economic theories:

In other words, Friedman believes that economic theories should be appraised in terms of their predictions concerning prices and quantities exchanged on markets. In his view, what matters is 'narrow predictive success' (Hausman 1994b), not overall predictive adequacy. So economists can simply ignore the disquieting findings of surveys. They can ignore the fact that people do not always prefer larger bundles of commodities to smaller bundles of commodities. They need not be troubled that some of their models suppose that all agents know the prices of all present and future commodities in all markets. All that matters is whether the predictions concerning market phenomena turn out to be correct or not. And since anomalous market outcomes could be due to any number of uncontrolled causal factors, while experiments are difficult or impossible to carry out, it turns out that economists need not worry about ever encountering evidence that would disconfirm fundamental theory. Detailed models may be confirmed or disconfirmed, but fundamental theory is safe. In this way one can understand how Friedman's methodology, which appears to justify the eclectic and pragmatic view that economists should use any model that appears to "work” regardless of how absurd or unreasonable its assumptions might appear, has been put in service of a rigid theoretical orthodoxy.

But this is fairly gentle (as befits an encyclopedia article), by comparison to some of the other philosophical verdicts; for example: John Dupre, writing in the Philosophical Review 104 (1995): 151: "[e]conomic theory [is] one of the more dismal empirical failures in the history of science." Daniel Hausman, writing in his important book The Inexact and Separate Science of Economics (CUP, 1992), 139:

The justification for a particular paradigm or research program, like the justification for the commitment to economics as a separate science, is success and progress, including especially empirical success and progress. Since economics has not been very successful and has not made much empirical progress, economists should be exploring alternatives....

No one has been more damning, though, than Alexander Rosenberg, in both his widely anthologized "If Economics Isn't Science, What Is It?" and his book Economics--Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns? (University of Chicago Press, 1992). A sampling from the article:

microeconomic theory has made no advances in the management of economic processes since its current formalism was first elaborated in the nineteenth century.

the twentieth-century history of economic theory certainly does not appear to be that of an empirical science.

Economists would indeed be well-advised not to surrender their...research program, if only they could boast even a small part of the startling successes that other [similarly structured] research programs have achieved. But two hundred years of work in the same direction have produced nothing comparable to the physicists' discovery of new planets, or of new technologies by which to control the mechanical phenomena that Newton's laws synthesized. Economics have attained no independently substantiated insight into their domain to rival the biologists' understanding of macroevolution and its underlying mechanism of adaptation and heredity.

There is, of course, a vast literature on why economics has so little in the way of predictive content, and on how a theory so dependent on idealizations and factually false assumptions as microeconomics can nevertheless constituted a respectable scientific enterprise....The only two things clear about this literature are that economists have found it almost universally satisfying and legitimating, and noneconomists have consistently been left unsatisfied, insisting that methodological excuses are no substitute for attempting to do what economics has hitherto not done: improve its predictive content.

Economists, of course, take the existence of a Nobel Prize in their field as an indication of the closeness of their field to real science. But perhaps the best rationale for a Nobel Prize in economics is its proximity to literature?

Seeking Restaurant Recommendations in London

Permit me to impose, yet again, on the knowledge of my cosmpolitan readers.  We are living near the intersection of Baker St. & Marylebone, and would be grateful for restaurant recommendations (all cuisines) of places that might be within modest walking distance.  Either e-mail me or post comments here (though bear in mind that there may be a delay between when you submit the comment and when it appears).  Good places in or around UCL and Birkbeck would also be welcome.

Many thanks, as always.

How America Appears to the World: A Perspective from Japan

Here; an excerpt:

Today, abuses of conventions of international and U.S. law are the direct outcome of orders promulgated in the very highest echelons of power in Washington. And yet, the commanders continue to pass responsibility for these outright illegalities onto the weakest links at the bottom of the chain of command.

The reason for this lies in the culture of irresponsibility created and nurtured by the Bush administration. According to this, the buck does not stop on the president's desk, where it should, but is rather passed on down and dropped in the lap of the weak, the vulnerable and the unwitting. Never has the U.S. ever experienced, in such a comprehensive manner, a ruling clique whose measure of governing is "the rulers can do no wrong" and whose password is "shirk and destroy."

The Eichmanns, Calleys and Englands of this world must surely take responsibility for their individual actions. "Only following orders" is not an excuse that is acceptable in the courtroom.

But when an entire government, such as the present one in Washington, is permeated by a culture of avoidance of truth and the shifting of blame -- be it for abuses in a prison or for crude finger-pointing in the aftermath of natural disasters -- and when leaders of a country blatantly flaunt international treaties, universally honored conventions and fair legal practice, we are obliged to ask, "What has happened to justice?"

An administration that can so unashamedly avoid responsibility will try its hand at anything. In a courtroom where the criminals act as judge, even the defense of "I was only giving orders" is bound to prevail.

London

Yesterday and today:  sunny and temperatures in the low 70s (farenheit, obviously).  Unbelievably beautiful.  Can gray days and chilly weather be far off?   Hopefully! 

Postmodernism and Sociology, and the Case of Bourdieu

Sociologist Fabio Rojas at Indiana University at Bloomington writes:

As a frequent reader of your blog, I was quite interested to read your postmodernism entry. I agree fully with your assessment. I am a sociologist and post-modernism plays a fairly small role in contemporary sociology. I teach a wide range of courses, from intro soc to graduate level courses in social organization, and I have only once taught post-modern theory. If you read the major journals, post-modernism is completely absent as a topic, or in citations, except when post-modernists address specific empirical topics. For example, research on prisons might cite Foucault. As you noted, only the self-labeled “theoretical” journals will publish articles on deconstruction, Foucault, Lyotard and other post-modern topics.

There is one important subtlety that most people get wrong. People often mistakenly label “difficult French or German writers” as “post-modern.” If we stick to your definition, post-modernism as a specific sort of skepticism, then a lot of difficult European social theorists are the opposite of post-modern. Bourdieu comes to mind. He believes there is an objective social reality and he also believes he has a concrete theory of how social reality works. Not skeptical at all. In fact, a number of empirically minded sociologists have tried to statistically test a number of predictions associated with Bourdieu’s theory.   But when lazy journalists talk about post-modernism in the universities, he, and others, are mistakenly labeled as post-modern.

Personal Ads of the Philosophers: Kant

SWM, 56, university professor, virgin, just finishing big book, looking for expanded social life. Hobbies include walking around town, starry-sky gazing, rational self-governance. I do not enjoy liars, promise-breakers, dogmatic slumbers, doing the morally right thing (but I do it anyway, out of respect for duty) or travelling. Seeks woman (Konigsberg area, please) for non-exploitative relationship based on mutual respect for our rational natures.

(Originally posted December 6, 2003.)

"The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology"

MOVING TO THE FRONT from Sept. 29--comments are still welcome.

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

A working draft of this paper co-authored with Joshua Knobe (Philosophy, North Carolina) is now available for download on SSRN.  (Joshua's name should appear first on the SSRN page, but the SSRN program wouldn't cooperate, I guess because I have the existing SSRN account--the names appear correctly on the paper itself, which is a genuinely joint effort.)  The final version of the paper will appear in B. Leiter & N. Sinhababu (eds.), Nietzsche and Morality (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007), which will also include new papers by Simon Blackburn (Cambridge), Maudemarie Clark & David Dudrick (Colgate), Thomas Hurka (Toronto), Nadeem Hussain (Stanford), Christopher Janaway (Southampton), Peter Poellner (Warwick), Bernard Reginster (Brown), Mathias Risse (Harvard), Donald Rutherford (UCSD), Neil Sinhababu (Texas), and R. Jay Wallace (Berkeley).

Here is the abstract:

Contemporary moral psychology has been dominated by two broad traditions, one usually associated with Aristotle, the other with Kant. The broadly Aristotelian approach emphasizes the role of childhood upbringing in the development of good moral character, and the role of such character in ethical behavior. The broadly Kantian approach emphasizes the role of freely chosen conscious moral principles in ethical behavior. We review a growing body of experimental evidence that suggests that both of these approaches are predicated on an implausible view of human psychology. This evidence suggests that both childhood upbringing and conscious moral principles have extraordinarily little impact on people's moral behavior.

This paper argues that moral psychology needs to take seriously a third approach, derived from Nietzsche. This approach emphasizes the role of heritable psychological and physiological traits in explaining behavior. In particular, it claims that differences in the degree to which different individuals behave morally can often be traced back to heritable differences between those individuals. We show that this third approach enjoys considerable empirical support -- indeed that it is far better supported by the empirical data than are either the Aristotelian or Kantian traditions in moral psychology.

This volume will be going to OUP in the next month or month-and-a-half, but we are still revising this paper and welcome comments.

How America Appears to the World: A Perspective from London

Here; an excerpt: 

At the end of a cruel and turbulent summer, nobody is more dismayed and demoralized about America than Americans.

They have watched with growing disbelief and horror as a convergence of events - dominated by the unending war in Iraq and two hurricanes - have exposed ugly and disturbing things in the undergrowth that shame and embarrass Americans and undermine their belief in the nation and its values.

With TV providing a ceaseless backdrop of the country's failings - a crippled and tone-deaf president, a negligent government, corruption, military atrocities, soaring debt, racial conflict, poverty, bloated bodies in floodwater, people dying on camera for want of food, water and medicine - it seemed things were falling apart in the land where happiness is promoted in the constitution.

Disillusioning news was everywhere. In the flight from Hurricane Rita, evacuees fought knife fights over cans of petrol. In storm-hit Louisiana there were long queues at gun stores as people armed themselves against looters.

America, which has the world's costliest health care, had, it turned out, higher infant mortality rates than the broke and despised Cuba.

Tom De Lay, Republican enforcer in the House of Representatives, was indicted for conspiracy and money laundering. The leader of the Republicans in the Senate was under investigation for his stock dealings. And Osama bin Laden was still on the loose.

Americans are the planet's biggest flag wavers. They are reared on the conceit that theirs is the world's best and most enviable country, born only the day before yesterday but a model society with freedom, opportunity and prosperity not found, they think, in older cultures.

They rejoice that "We are No.1", and in many ways they are.

But events have revealed a creeping mildew of pain and privation, graft and injustice and much incompetence lurking beneath the glow of star-spangled superiority.

Many here feel the country is breaking down and losing its moral and political authority.

The author may underestimate the American capacity for delusion and self-deception.

New Philosophers' Carnival is...

...here.

Is Bush's Nominee to the Supreme Court a Young Earth Creationist?

This is worrisome, and should be disqualifying if it reflects her views.  Perhaps she does not subscribe to the brazen scientific ignorance and illiteracy of her church, but membership in such an institution does raise real questions about intellectual competence.

The Onion Zaps Loudmouth Philosophy Students

So many readers have kindly sent me this item that I have to post it.

"Meet the Fuckers": Bush and Cheney

But not on Southwest Airlines!

George Bush "Hearing Voices"

Indeed.  Leaders of civilized countries must be hard-pressed not to burst into laughter when this absurd man enters the room.

Those Famous Anti-War Democrats Strike Again...

...and vote another $50 billion for war.  Silly me, I thought America was a one-party state.

Friday Poem: "Days Like This"

                                 Days Like This

Days like this I wait for inspiration clearing my mind of calculation
    of desire of ambition especially fleeing from numbers/ I practice patience
I think good thoughts of things that seem to matter and I frown steadily on the
    trivial which cowers in a closet
I think of my tiny grandson who is himself inspired who speaks only enough
    to marshal action/ I envy him his economy of language his  authority over a
    world of giants
I think of my grown sons who are polar on the compass and of the mysterious
    architecture of  becoming that bifurcates my nature into theirs yet preserves
    the authenticity of all of us/ I think of it in wonder
I think of my ‘found’ children into whose garden I have stumbled of the nest
    in which I imagine them waiting to be fed and when I do not think of them
    as birds I think of them as flowers
I think of stolid summer all around us women’s bodies lightly covered infants
    naked in pools of shining water and of their mothers shepherding their
    harvest of lambs/  I think of expectation
I think of the weight of longing of its faces and voices/ of those longings
    doomed to failure of longings out of the wishfulness of sorrow of the 
    longings I  will bury with my name the longings that will tick in me forever
I think of women neutrally with quiet pleasure as befits my twilight legacy
    and of their beauty even in imperfection of their permanence in the heart’s
    treasure and especially of those who were willing to grant me shelter
I think of loneliness and I hope it thinks of me/ lonely since the first parting
    partings which have multiplied to many
I think of poets beneath an alphabet of burdens soaking in a river of memories
    I admire the clamor they raise in the face of death and silence I think of
    Vallejo Valery Cavafy I think of all the others
Days like this I wish I were touching someone’s hand or lips or supple waist
    I wish I had not joined my character and its fate I wish I had been another
    unaffected by this uncertain fire/ less riven less guilty less ashamed
Dense days like this under the inexorable hum of air conditioners/ sheltered
    from the pestilence of heat my soul abandons my body and I forget I am a
    simple man/ days like this I wait for joy to ask me in for events to turn my
    way for the words to be found to inject consolation into my frame and allow
    me some abatement
I think of this I think of more thinking through my long tunnel of recollection
    and thinking through my full firmament of deeds and while thinking I write
    these words waiting to be emancipated or enslaved writing perhaps from
    loss of nerve or from exhausted patience I write these words without the
    gloss of inspiration from some vestigial reserve of dumb determination
    I write these words hoping to be heard
   
6/25-6/30/98 

Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission.

Bush's Nomination of Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court

Being in London, I do not have the benefit of insight from my colleagues in Austin who no doubt remember Ms. Miers when she was President of the State Bar of Texas.  That the right-wing blogosphere and media are so displeased with Bush's choice suggests she may yet go down for the count in the Senate.  (Is Ms. Miers a strategic ploy, as some have suggested, designed to make it all the harder to reject a more qualified, and perhaps more conservative, candidate yet to come?  Who knows?  I'm skeptical, as Bush has, throughout his bungled career, always been loyal-to-a-fault to those he is closest with, and Ms. Miers is in that inner circle.) 

Her resume and career do not, needless to say, compare favorably to that of the new Chief Justice, John Roberts, though that may be the least of it, since stellar credentials do not necessarily guarantee good moral judgment, as we have had occasion to note with respect to the last nomination.  More worrisome is that Ms. Miers is, it is reported, an evangelical Christian, a fact which is unlikely to influence her judgment in ways that favor cosmopolitan and Enlightenment values.  At bottom, though, she is an unknown, even more so than Roberts.  If any Texas readers with experience with Ms. Miers in professional or other contexts have insight, I'd be grateful to hear from you.

UPDATE:  As luck would have it, Ms. Miers already has a blog!

ANOTHER:  This from the far right National Review:  "In the White House that hero worshipped the
president, Miers was distinguished by the intensity of her zeal: She once told me that the    president was the most brilliant man she had ever met."  This rather suggests that Ms. Miers does not get out enough.  But more seriously, how is a Justice Miers likely to rule on the authority of the "brilliant president" to spirit away citizens to military brigs on his say-so?

Philosopher's Tics

A reader sends in this amusing list of "philosopher's tics"--none of which, of course, are ever in evidence on this blog!

Philosopher's Tics: The inability to pass over a faulty inference or fallacy in silence, or to correct it in a spirit of generosity; a relentless need to accuse one's adversary of insufficient 'rigor', or of 'misreading' or 'failing to understand' one's position; and, the worst of all, a constant need to drive home one's greater intellect, at the expense of the merits of the argument. I married a philosophy major...so I may be particularly sensitive to these tics.

But wouldn't the world be a better place if there were fewer faulty inferences, more rigor and better reading, and if everyone were as smart as philosophers?

Tic, tic, tic...

[Originally posted July 2, 2004.]

More on the One-Party State in America

Here; an excerpt:

The media tell us that the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination for president in 2008 are Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Bill Richardson and maybe John Kerry. What all these people have in common is their deafening silence on all the issues of importance facing Americans and America.

Not one dared show her or his face at the record demonstration against the Iraq War held in front of the White House last weekend.

None has spoken out on the Republican corruption scandals.

None has called for a public program to hire all the displaced of New Orleans to put them to work rebuilding the destroyed city. Instead, they are allowing Bush and the Republican Congress, with the acquiescence of Louisiana's corrupt local Democratic Party, to bring in speculators and the same profiteers who have been sucking up the reconstruction money in Iraq.

None has offered a plan to attack the U.S. deficit and the hollowing out of the American economy.

None of these "leading opposition candidates" has even taken any kind of strong stand on global warming--for example calling for a tax surcharge on low-mileage cars and trucks and strict limits on carbon emissions by power plants plus a crash program to develop alternative energy sources.

The truth is that when it comes to the Democratic Party, the purported opposition party, there is no there there. It no longer exists.

This, perhaps, overstates the dire situation America is in.  We do have two parties:  the party of the imprudent and short-sighted ruling class, which often carries the torch for nascent fascist theocracy; and the party of the somewhat more prudent ruling class, the Democrats.  That the latter are, in general, only more prudent--and not opposed on principle to the other party--may go some distance to explaining why they their response is often so spineless in the face of the Republican juggernaut.

New, On-Line Philosophy Conference for Young Philosophers and Grad Students

Details here.  Thomas Nadelhoffer (Philosophy, Florida State) has done a splendid job putting this together.

UPDATE:  Note that because of the high acceptance rate by invited people, the on-line conference will include about 22 invited talks and only 4-5 submissions from philosophers out less than 5 years and grad students.

A Priori in the Buckian Sense

NEW UPDATE (10/5/05) AT END.

(ORIGINALLY posted April 11, 2004).

Stuart Buck , another Federalist Society lawyer (like the unfortunate Lawrence VanDyke, who is well-known to readers of this blog) is apparently intent on making sure the Federalist Society gets a reputation as a hotbed of dense apologists for Intelligent Design. Mr. Buck is the non-philosopher blogger Mr. VanDyke invoked, whom I alluded to in an earlier posting on Mr. VanDyke's muddle through philosophical naturalism . Mr. Buck's own muddle, as I noted, provoked a reply from a biologist ( they continue their "dialogue" here), and now also a physicist.

Mr. Buck, needless to say, remains quite attached to his "insight" that there are two different senses of "a priori," one of which he denominates the "Kantian" sense. He explains:

Scientists often say as follows: 'Other scientists have seen that methodological naturalism has worked in the past; therefore I will approach any new problem with a strict insistence that only naturalistic solutions will be considered, because I have decided that only naturalistic solutions count as 'science.' Leiter focuses on the first part of that sentence [note: the sentence is Buck's, not Leiter's], and accordingly insists that methodological naturalism was not collectively chosen 'a priori' in the Kantian sense. That's all fine and well, but it says nothing about whether an individual scientist today approaches new problems having ruled out a particular type of solution without regard for its truth. In that sense, the commitment to methodological naturalism is 'a priori,' because it comes prior to an individual scientist's investigation of any actual new problem or question.

Where to begin? Let's take "a priori" in the new, "Buckian sense." Scientists believe something "a priori in the Buckian sense" if "it comes prior to an individual's scientist's investigation of any actual new problem or question." So, e.g., since most scientists accept the truth of Newtonian mechanics for mid-size physical objects, despite the fact that most of them have never conducted any investigations or experiments to confirm Newtonian mechanics, it follows that they accept it, then, "a priori in the Buckian sense." Needless to say, natural scientists quite generally accept methodological naturalism "a priori in the Buckian sense."

Indeed, it goes farther than that: most of us who are educated accept evolutionary biology "a priori in the Buckian sense" (after all, I'm no biologist, what do I know beyond what I've read and been told about it?). Indeed, I accept that FDR was President from 1932 to 1945, and that Hitler was a genocidal maniac in Germany during roughly those same years, and that Nietzsche was born in 1844 and died in 1900, and that Americans fought for independence from the British in the late 18th-century--I accept all of that "a priori in the Buckian sense," since I've done no empirical investigation to confirm any of it.

What that means, of course, is that for a belief to be "a priori in the Buckian sense" is utterly trivial: huge portions of what laymen and scientists alike accept is "a priori in the Buckian sense." Of course, it is quite rational to continue to accept as true our beliefs that are "a priori in the Buckian sense" as long as (a) the processes by which we acquired the beliefs are epistemically reliable, and (b) we don't encounter conflicting evidence in the course of subequent experience and investigation. The latter, I take it, is Dr. Myers's point when he says to Buck:

If Intelligent Design creationists (or ghost-hunters, or crystal-healers, or zero-point energy advocates) were to actually produce any evidence of the phenomena they claim to study, we'd jump up and take notice. While Buck tries to claim it is irrelevant, it is actually the heart of the matter, and that's the whole point of what I was saying: gathering evidence is the foundation of what scientists do. Rolling your eyes and dismissing the point [as Buck did] while claiming, in essence, that 'it doesn't matter, scientists won't accept evidence of intelligent design even if we had any, so we won't bother' doesn't get us anywhere. Especially since it is false.

In other words, in the absence of any evidence incompatible with methodological naturalism, we have no reason to give it up, despite its being, for most people, "a priori in the Buckian sense." (Let me note, though Mr. Buck does not, that this same issue came up in my earlier posting on VanDyke, in connection with the misrepresentation of Larry Laudan's views. As I wrote then: "Beckwith quotes Laudan [at 25] noting that ID 'is inconsistent with methodological naturalism and ontological materialism...[b]ut that fact has no bearing whatsoever on the plausbility of the arguments for ID.' Why does Laudan say that? Because methodological naturalism is an a posteriori doctrine, which means if ID generated any empirical results incompatible with it—it has not, of course—then so much the worse for MN. The problem is purely a posteriori: ID has no research program and no empirical support, so it presents no challenge at all to the reliance on naturalistical explanatory mechanisms.")

Personal Ads of the Philosophers: Nietzsche

SWM, 42, retired academic living on modest pension, some health problems but highly resilient. Handsome in a Teutonic way. Enjoys solitude, walking in the mountains, fate, the French, and opera (Bizet, not Wagner!). Anti-religious (both the church and its poison). Seeks woman willing to will the eternal return of our relationship. No Germans, "free thinkers," Anglophiles, or anti-semites. No permanent mailing address, so please respond to Box #1291.

(Originally posted December 4, 2003).

Start-of-the-Month Blog Stats

Not quite 110,000 visitor sessions in September, which suggests that roughly 1 out of 5 visitors who used to come here last Spring were here for the law school news, and so have migrated, accordingly, to the new site.  That means the rest of you are here for politics/culture, philosophy news, or philosophy, or all three!

56% of visitors last month were repeat visitors (the actual number of repeat visitors is no doubt a bit higher, since some folks view the site from different computers), down from the more typical 65% repeat visitors last Spring.  One explanation is that the longer the site is around, and the more hits it gets, the more often it turns up as a result in random Google searches.

I last posted about the country of origin of visitors in early January of 2005.  There have been a few changes since (though bear in mind that this data is aggregated from the start of the blog, in August 2003, so any country that has increased its share of the readership in the last nine months must have actually had a higher percentage of the visits than the number reported below). 

The U.S. accounted for about 81% of the visits, the same as in January.

The U.K. accounted for 5.5% of visits, up slightly from 5.2% as of last January.

Canada now accounts for 4.7% of all visits to the blog, up significantly from 3.9% of all visits for the period from August 2003 until early January 2005.

Australia accounted for 1.2% of all visits, down from 1.6% as of early January of this year.

Other regions of note (with the January figure in parentheses):

Continental Europe: 2.2% (2.3%)

Germany:  .8% (.6%)

France:  .3% (.4%)

Scandinavia:  .7% (.8%--Finland used to account for 2/3rds of this total, but now accounts for less than half)

Japan:  .5% (.6%)

Singapore:  .3% (.4%)

Visits from Ireland, Israel, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, and New Zealand each account for .2% of the visits--that could, of course, be just a handful of very loyal readers!

Essentially, there appears to have been a non-trivial increase in visitors from Britain and Canada in the last nine months, which pushed down the percentage of total visitors from most other places. 

And, remember, the blogging schedule will be different while I'm in London.

Thanks to all for reading.