Sago Boulevard

There’s a classic debate in philosophy of law about the status of so-called immoral legal systems. The example typically used is Nazism and question is framed as follows. Do we say, as Lon Fuller famously argued, that “laws” passed by the German legislature in the 1930s cannot accurately be called “laws” by viture of their flagrantly immoral nature? Or do we say, along with H. L. A. Hart, that Nazi law is in fact “law”, insofar as it follows from a recognizably legal process?

In Law’s Empire, Ronald Dworkin argues (I think compellingly) that this debate is largely based on theories of law which overstate the role of semantic rules in legal interpreation. There is a widely-used sense of “law” in which Nazi law clearly qualifies. That is, we often use the term to refer simply to the product of legislative actions. Yet, when we speak of the “rule of law” and “respect for law”, we have in mind a loftier notion of justice that Nazi law lacked. In Dworkin’s words (p. 103-104):

We need not deny that the Nazi system was an example of law… because there is an available sense in which it plainly was law. But we have no difficulty in understanding someone who does say that Nazi law was not really law, or was law in a degenerate sense, or was less than fully law. For he is not then using “law” in that sense… His judgment is now a special kind of political judgment for which his language, if the context makes this clear, is entirely appropriate.

Mortimer Zuckerman, known most famously as the editor-in-chief of US News and World Report, recently visited the Lakewood Yeshivah and had this to say (via S):

It was at the behest of a rabbi I study with that I went and visited the Lakewood Yeshiva. I had never been to a yeshiva before in my life and I sort of did this out of some degree of curiosity but more out of a sense of moral support for what had been such a central part of this rabbi’s life but I have to tell you when I got there I was absolutely knocked out by it. I will tell you that it was the single most intellectually active, energetic, fascinating environment I had ever witnessed. There was a sort of buzz and just sheer concentration and joy in the learning process and it was literally visible to somebody like myself.

I mean, I said it afterwards, it made Harvard Law School, which I happen to have attended, look like a kindergarten.

I really hope he’s right about the kindergarten part as I’m planning to start law school in the fall.

We should take notice of any legal action that limits freedom of expression, even if it turns out to be justified. Libel and slander laws, for instance, explicitly limit free speech and that shouldn’t be taken lightly. It’s justified, not because free speech doesn’t apply, but rather because the negative externalities of limitless libel and slander outweigh other considerations.

The anti-Holocaust-denial legislation that helped convict David Irving should be viewed in this light. The question isn’t whether or not it violates free speech (of course it does). It’s whether or not allowing public Holocaust-denying is better.

From what I can tell, the discussion over Irving’s conviction seems to be about censorship in general. Alonzo Fyfe argues:

[C]ounter-words are the only legitimate response to the claims that David Irving made. Responding to his words with violence (including the violence of state-imposed punishment) is no different that Muslims responding to the Mohammed cartoons with violence.

Jim Lindgren writes similarly:

I don’t think that holocaust denial… should be a crime… [T]he cartoon riots have confirmed and strengthened this opinion. The Imams are right to point to the inconsistency in European treatment between holocaust denial and blasphemy against Mohammed.

The comparison with the Danish anti-Muslim cartoons misses a crucial difference. Holocaust denial conjures up an image of violence. It has been and continues to be used by anti-Semites to rally against Jews and against Israel. It should come as no surprise that Arab countries that deny Israel’s right to exist and sponsor terrorism against it, regularly support claims that Jews exaggerated the Holocaust for political purposes.

This is not the case regarding the Mohammed cartoons. Although a negative reaction from the Muslim world was surely expected, there is no particular violence against Muslims that the cartoons represent. I think it’s reasonable to distinguish between the two on these grounds. Holocaust denial is clearly associated with violence against Jews and thus, qualifies as incitement. In countries where this is especially true (i.e. Austria) I think legislation criminalizing it is justified.

Amba offers a sneak preview of a book she’s writing, tentatively entitled OUTSIDE: Spiritual Nomads and the Way Beyond Religion. She discusses the practical and spiritual advantages of being an outsider of any particular religious tradition while using the tools of religion and modern science to construct faith anew.

Amba tries to straddle a middle ground between denying religion and professing loyalty to a specific tradition. The advantage to this approach is obvious:

When you swear exclusive allegiance to no one tradition, their multiplicity is… a vast resource: the record of over 10,000 years of research, a grand reference library for the study of reality.

But there’s a contradiction here. As Amba notes earlier in her post,

When you live inside a tradition… you agree to view life through its window — an outlook, a way of framing reality, carefully preserved through time.

This point can’t be easily dismissed. Judaism, for example, commands the believer to view the world through a rabbinic lense. Christianity, the lense of the Gospels and Islam, that of the Koran. To step outside, as Amba recommends, is to deny all of them.

Amba suggests that every religious tradition could be a “vital tributary” in the search for “insight and direction as we find our way through a radically reconfigured reality”. But this is impossible. One cannot deny the basic tenent of a particular religious tradition while simultaneously claiming to incorporate it into a new one. And Amba admits to denying religion’s central claim, which is looking at the world through the eyes of prophets (whomever you believe the genuine prophets to be).

Responding to Amba’s post, Seth makes an important observation:

The truly pious are also open enough to be able to explore the world through their own traditions for their entire lives, without running into limits beyond which they may not look. The truly pious don’t fear knowledge.

In “Jerusalem and Athens”, Leo Strauss offers a model of someone standing in Jerusalem, looking outward at Athens (the city representative of philosophy and modernity), studying it, learning from it, and using its methods to illuminate those aspects of his own city that lend themselves to such analysis. Not only is this a legitimate approach but one championed by the giants of Jewish tradition themselves. Amba, though, calls on us to leave Jerusalem and look at both cities from the outside. Leaving Jerusalem, in this model, is denying Judaism. Once having denied it, you have neither the right nor the ability to eat the fruit its wisdom. “Etz hayyim hi lemahazikim bah,” the Torah is a tree of life, not to anybody, but to those to hold onto it. That is, those who keep it.

Jonah Avriel Cohen brings an important perspective to raging debate over the cause of terrorism. I think his diagnosis of the fallicies in some of these arguments is dead-on.

Some will claim that poverty or occupation or lack of democracy in the Middle East is the root cause of this murdering and maiming.

Others, particularly in Europe, will predictably say its source rests in American foreign policy, such as toppling Saddam Hussein or supporting the existence of Israel.
…
Or, as some in Hollywood now claim, they will say the terrorist violence is a “response to a response,” a cycle of violence whose cure is “understanding.”

But all of these explanations share one philosophical assumption in common: namely, something in the external world drives men to suicide bombing. In this view, which is found more often on the political left than on the right, such terrorism must have a material and objective basis; the crimes of humanity, so it seems, are never spiritual and subjective in origin. Always and in all cases the external world – the economic or governmental or cultural context – is what causes one man to slay others. Neither an inner sickness of the heart nor a demented philosophy of the head, nor human nature itself, is responsible. It is always something outside: a lack of money, an insult, an injustice, a loss of honor.

More plainly, it is always something else’s fault, never one’s own inner bareness and lack of imagination.
…
[I]f external factors such as poverty and injustice were sufficient conditions for suicide bombing, then poor Africans and impoverished Indians would be suicide bombing too, just as Tibetans would be blowing up Chinese restaurants were occupation and human rights violations the causes of terrorism…

Simply put, external events are neither necessary nor sufficient for suicide bombing. As the old stoic Epictetus, a former slave who knew misery well, said: “Men are not influenced by things but by their thoughts about things.”
…
[H]owever similar our circumstances, each of us lives in a universe that is stamped through and through by our distinct personality, our ideas, our feelings, our desires, our instincts, our intuition, our Self. We have direct awareness only of these inner forces that filter our empirical experience, which also shapes our view of our own culture and upbringing. The buzzing external world, by contrast, is but an indirect influence.

I don’t completely agree with Cohen’s analysis and I’m not a Stoic. There are many situations where external pressue can simply overwhelm free choice. When that external pressure is a gun to the head, we call it coercion. When it’s years of psychological oppression, it’s much harder to identify and trace its source. That said, we would do well to question whether or not this is the case for Jihadists.

The 26th philosophers’ carnival is up at Hesperus/Phosphorus.

Design your own Simpsons character (via Professor Bainbridge).

In trying to argue against the possibility of a secular ethics, Jewish Philosopher stumbles over a classic mistake:

Obviously, there is no “natural” morality. If there is no universal, eternal lawgiver then there is no universal, eternal law.

Anybody who’s ready Plato’ Euthyphro will immediately see the fallacy here. In fact, it’s not a mistake limited to philosophers of religion. Legal realists and positivists are often guilty of the same. But since Jewish Philosopher is trying to make a point about religion, we’ll stick to that for now.

The problem is as follows. Let’s assume that there is indeed no ethical law without a lawgiver. What is my obligation to obey the lawgiver? If you say it is because the lawgiver is God, who created the world and gave Israel the Torah, you walk right into a logical dilemma. How can I have an obligation to obey the lawgiver if my basic ethical obligations only kick in with the command itself?

Fortunately, the rabbis were better philosophers than so-called Jewish Philosopher. The fundamental Jewish answer to the question ‘why obey the lawgiver’ is found in the 13 Attributes of Mercy (Ex. 34:6-7). In short, God embodies goodness and thus imitating Him is imitating goodness. In order for divine goodness to validate, as it does, divine authority, we must take for granted that the quality of goodness itself precedes the divine command.

This is to say that divine authority cannot logically be identical to the specific command itself. It follows, then, that goodness - which ultimately generates that authority - is ontologically independent of the divine command.

Hirhurim links to an excellent essay by R. Ronnie Ziegler about the superfluousness of formal proofs of God’s existence. The essay a part of a whole series of commentary on R. Soloveitchik’s philosophy and I highly recommend it to anybody trying to work through the Rav’s writing.

[I]f a person experiences God in a direct and unmediated manner, what need does he have for abstract proofs? Both in “The Lonely Man of Faith” (p.52) and “U-vikkashtem Mi-sham” (p.133), the Rav approvingly quotes Kierkegaard’s pointed remark on this subject:

“Does the loving bride in the embrace of her beloved ask for proof that he is alive and real? Must the prayerful soul clinging in passionate love and ecstasy to her Beloved demonstrate that He exists? So asked Soren Kierkegaard sarcastically when told that Anselm of Canterbury, the father of the very abstract and complex ontological proof, spent many days in prayer and supplication that he be presented with rational evidence of the existence of God.”

From Monday’s The Daily Show (via Cicero):

Jon Stewart: “Yes, as you’ve just heard, a near-tragedy over the weekend in south Texas. Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a man during a quail hunt at a political supporter’s ranch. Making 78-year-old Harry Whittington the first person shot by a sitting VP since Alexander Hamilton.

“Hamilton, of course, shot in a duel with Aaron Burr over issues of honor, integrity and political maneuvering. Whittington? Mistaken for a bird.
…
Jon Stewart: “I’m joined now by our own vice-presidential firearms mishap analyst, Rob Corddry. Rob, obviously a very unfortunate situation. How is the vice president handling it?

Rob Corddry: “Jon, tonight the vice president is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Wittington. According to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time there were quail in the brush.

“And while the quail turned out to be a 78-year-old man, even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face. He believes the world is a better place for his spreading buckshot throughout the entire region of Mr. Whittington’s face.”

Jon Stewart: “But why, Rob? If he had known Mr. Whittington was not a bird, why would he still have shot him?”

Rob Corddry: “Jon, in a post-9-11 world, the American people expect their leaders to be decisive. To not have shot his friend in the face would have sent a message to the quail that America is weak.”

Amitai Sandy certainly has the most interesting response to Iranian Holocaust-cartoon contest (via Dean):

Amitai Sandy (29), graphic artist and publisher of Dimona Comix Publishing, from Tel-Aviv, Israel, has followed the unfolding of the “Muhammad cartoon-gate” events in amazement, until finally he came up with the right answer to all this insanity - and so he announced today the launch of a new anti-Semitic cartoons contest - this time drawn by Jews themselves!

“We’ll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew hating cartoons ever published!” said Sandy “No Iranian will beat us on our home turf!”
…
The deadline is Sunday March 5, and the best works will be displayed in an Exhibition in Tel-Aviv, Israel.

At the moment, I’m too amazed to form an opinion about whether or not this a good idea. I’m withholding judgement for now.

One of the great philosophers of the 20th century passed away earlier this week. I first encountered Strawson’s work in a class in philosophy of space and time and wrote a paper on his understanding of Kant’s theory of geometry. Philosophers contribute more to society that we realize and we should take a few moments to honor their memory.

Bill Vallicella is guiding us through Daniel Dennett’s newest book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. I think he’s right in pointing to the definitions of both “supernatural” and “religion” as the major weakness of Dennett’s argument.

Having yet to read Dennet’s newest attempt to rescue humanity from God, I can only base my admittingly premature evaluation on previous works. I recommend reading Vallicella’s posts on the subject regardless, as many of his key arguments stand alone.

Doesn’t this belong in The Onion?

As I’ve said before, the popular mantra that God belongs in the home and not in government is a slap in the face to religion everywhere. It unfairly holds religious ideas to a different standard than the various political, social, and moral ideologies regularly paraded into the public sphere. The uproar over the Danish cartoon is yet another example of how poor Western secularists understand religion. Stanley Fish makes this point in today’s NY Times:

The first tenet of the liberal religion is that everything (at least in the realm of expression and ideas) is to be permitted, but nothing is to be taken seriously. This is managed by the familiar distinction — implied in the First Amendment’s religion clause — between the public and private spheres. It is in the private sphere — the personal spaces of the heart, the home and the house of worship — that one’s religious views are allowed full sway and dictate behavior.

But in the public sphere, the argument goes, one’s religious views must be put forward with diffidence and circumspection. You can still have them and express them — that’s what separates us from theocracies and tyrannies — but they should be worn lightly. Not only must there be no effort to make them into the laws of the land, but they should not be urged on others in ways that make them uncomfortable. What religious beliefs are owed — and this is a word that appears again and again in the recent debate — is “respect”; nothing less, nothing more.

The problem, as Fish exposes, is that public ambivalence toward religion is not only condescending, but self-refuting. Insofar as this attitude resembles a religion of its own, it’s a completely inadequate response to the Muslim world.

The argument from reciprocity — you do it to us, so how can you complain if we do it to you? — will have force only if the moral equivalence of “us” and “you” is presupposed. But the relativizing of ideologies and religions belongs to the liberal theology, and would hardly be persuasive to a Muslim.

This is why calls for “dialogue,” issued so frequently of late by the pundits with an unbearable smugness — you can just see them thinking, “What’s wrong with these people?” — are unlikely to fall on receptive ears. The belief in the therapeutic and redemptive force of dialogue depends on the assumption (central to liberalism’s theology) that, after all, no idea is worth fighting over to the death and that we can always reach a position of accommodation if only we will sit down and talk it out.

But a firm adherent of a comprehensive religion doesn’t want dialogue about his beliefs; he wants those beliefs to prevail. Dialogue is not a tenet in his creed, and invoking it is unlikely to do anything but further persuade him that you have missed the point — as, indeed, you are pledged to do, so long as liberalism is the name of your faith.

Last night, I saw Jerry Seinfeld’s stand-up performance with my brother in Baltimore. As expected, the entire show was laugh-out-loud funny. Almost all the material was new and there’s no indication that he’s slowing down anytime soon. Expect more first-class Seinfeld comedy for years to come.

Philosophers of religion are largely considered outcasts by both other philosophers and historians of religion. As a Judaic studies major (in addition to philosophy), I recall being frustrated that the most interesting questions seemed to be of little or no interest to my professors. We philosophers, I would try to explain, want to know about the ideas themselves, not just about the people who believed them. We’re not satisfied with merely knowing the cultural and historical context of a given religion, or how it developed over time, or how it influenced the political climate of a given age. All of that may be important but it’s only a means to an end. We want to know if the ideas are compelling, if they address and explain our most basic intuitions about the world. Bill Vallicella says it well:

[M]y interest in religion is not merely historical, or doxographical, or sociological any more than my interest in science is merely historical, or doxographical, or sociological. Science is more than a lot of opinions and practices. It is a route to truth. To put it bluntly, science gets at reality. I think of religion in the same way.

From the Washington Post:

Iran’s best-selling newspaper has launched a competition to find the best cartoon about the Holocaust in retaliation for the publication in many European countries of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad.

How in the world is making fun of the mass slaughter of Jews a retaliation for a Danish cartoon of Mohammad?! It still amazes me (even though I should expect it by now) how antisemitism find its way into every major conflict.

At the very least, maybe this episode will show the world the difference between Jewish and Muslim protest. My guess is that you won’t see Jewish groups blowing up Iranian embassies.

It is a favorite move of materialists and athesists to enlist scientific discovery for support. For the materialist, advances in cognitive science show that the human brain can give an adequate account of the human mind. For the atheist, evolution removes the need for divine creation.

Both of these moves are guilty of the same mistake. They attempt to draw metaphysical conclusions from what a given scientific inquiry does not show. In the case of the materialist turning to cognitive science, Darek Barefoot nails it on the head:

[Cognitive science] is beyond rational doubt a purposive enterprise, yet by restricting its inquiry to physical phenomena in the brain - as methodologically it must do - it necessarily will observe nothing but nonpurposive processes at work there. Which is more ridiculous, expecting beliefs and purposes to show up on EEGs and neurotransmitter scans or doubting their existence because they fail to show up there?

The atheist, in pointing to evolution as evidence that the world appears to have no intrinsic purpose or design, commits the same fallacy. Evolutionary biology is the attempt to explain the origin and development of life according to the laws of nature. With Barefoot I ask, is it more ridiculous to expect the scientist to stumble upon God or to doubt God’s existence because the scientist didn’t find Him?

Egypt calls on Hamas to end violence and accept Israel (via Seth).

Egypt intends to tell Hamas leaders that they must recognize Israel, disarm and honor past peace deals, a top Egyptian official told reporters Wednesday, in a new sign of how Arab governments are pushing the militant group to moderate after its surprise election victory.

I’m not sure what kind of weight this statement has but let’s take what we can get.

Hasan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, had this to say about Zarqawi:

“I believe the most dangerous thing we confront is the so-called Zarqawi phenomenon… This is a creed of killing without any responsibility — to kill women, children, to attack mosques, churches, schools, restaurants.”

Even Hezbollah has it’s limits.

R. Abraham Joshua Heschel in God in Search of Man, p. 171:

The realization of the dangerous greatness of man, of his immense power and ability to destroy all life on earth, must completely change our conception of man’s place and role in the divine scheme. If this great world of ours is not a trifle in the eyes of God, if the Creator is at all concerned with His creation, then man - who has the power to devise both culture and crime, but who is also able to be a proxy for divine justice - is important enough to be the recipient of spiritual light at the rare dawns of history.

A Mossad operative in Europe during the early 1970s wrote an opinion piece for last week’s Foward under the pseudonym “Resh”, criticizing Spielberg’s portrayal of the events surrounding the Munich Massacre. Even if you liked the movie, as I did, it’s always good to read the perspective of someone on the inside. In his words:

[”Munich”] badly distorts the circumstances under which Israeli intelligence operatives assassinated Palestinian terrorists outside the borders of Israel during the early 1970s. Because of the potential influence worldwide of a Spielberg film such as “Munich,” this has ramifications for both the Israeli and American responses to terrorism. Hence, the issues must be examined closely. Having served as a Mossad operative in Europe during the period in which the movie is set, I feel I can lend some useful historical perspective.