Sago Boulevard

A drunk driver causes a car accident which leads to a death. In most cases, the applicable crime is involuntary manslaughter but law isn’t my subject today. Pam Stubbart of The Excluded Middle wonders about the seeming lack of mens rea in this kind of case. (via Philosophers’ Carnival #49). Since alcohol impairs one’s ability to reason, a drunk driver may lack the very ability to intend to kill. One obvious response is that the drunk drivers chooses to drink and is thus responsible for his subsequent actions. To this, Stubbart responds that (more…)

Historian Howard Zinn doesn’t like Walter Kirn’s NYTimes review of his book, A Young People’s History of the United States. He even accuses Kirn of believing in objective truth, which, he claims, even “bright 12 year-olds” realize is nonsense.

The reviewer seems to hold to the 19th-century von Ranke idea that there is one truth to be told. Most historians, and most intelligent people, including bright 12-year-olds, understand that there is no such thing as a single “objective” truth, but that there are different truths according to the viewpoint of the historian.

The absurdity of Zinn’s relativism quickly reveals itself in the next paragraph. (more…)

Tales of Modernity hosts the Plato-themed 49th Philosophers’ Carnival.

The latest Philosophers’ Carnival is up at common sense philosophy. Enjoy

Gary Bass reviews Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies for this week’s NYT Magazine. Caplan argues that voters are not only ignorant but, worse, irrational - by which he means that they don’t think like economists. (more…)

Via Keith Burgess-Jackson, here’s a transcript of the famous 1948 BBC radio debate on the existence of God between Father Frederick C. Copleston, a Jesuit Catholic priest, and philosopher Bertrand Russell. The debate has a level of sophistication rarely seen. Read the whole thing; it’s terrific.

The latest Philosophers’ Carnival is up at nicomachus.net with an emphasis on practical philosophy.

R. Jonathan Sacks, A Letter in the Scroll (via Hirhurim):

Can we really know whether faith is justified? Do we, citizens of modernity and post-modernity, not take for granted what Hume, Kant and Nietzsche labored to establish, that the existence of God cannot be proved? And do we not as Jews–always inclined to rationality, and now chastened and chilled by the Holocaust–have more reason to doubt than most? Yet I have to admit, even as a professionally trained philosopher, that I am unmoved by this whole trend of thought, rendered trivial by its own circularity. Of course it is possible to live a life without God, just as it is possible to live a life without humor, or music, or love; and one can no more prove that God exists that one can prove these other things exist to those who lack a sense of humor, or to whom Schubert is mere noise, or love a figment of the romantic imagination…

Jewish faith is not a metaphysical wager, a leap into the improbable. It is the courage to see the world as it is, without the comfort of myth or the self-pity of despair, knowing that the evil, cruelty and injustice it contains are neither inevitable nor meaningless but instead a call to human responsibility–a call emanating from the heart of existence itself

Leo Strauss in “The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy”:

When we attempt to return to the roots of Western civilization, we observe soon that Western civilization has two roots which are in conflict with each other, the biblical and the Greek philosophic, and this is to begin with a very disconcerting observation. Yet this realization has also something reassuring and comforting. The very life of Western civilization is the life between two codes, a fundamental tension. There is therefore no reason inherent in the Western civilization itself, in its fundamental constitution, why it should give up life. But this comforting thought is justified only if we live that life, if we live that conflict, that is. No one can be both a philosopher and a theologian or, for that matter, a third which is beyond the conflict between philosophy and theology, or a synthesis of both. But every one of us can be and ought to be either the one or the other, the philosopher open to the challenge of theology or the theologian open to the challenge of philosophy.

In American politics, compromising and building consensus are greatly valued. And rightfully so. Speaking broadly, we believe that people in a given community should ideally have equal decision-making power. We further realize that different people have conflicting views about issues of great importance. Compromise seems to be an appropriate way to accommodate varying political values among our citizenry. However, Ronald Dworkin demonstrates that a certain kind of political compromise would be unacceptable. In Law’s Empire, he offers the following puzzle. (more…)

David Novak has an excellent review of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Already in the first paragraph Novak sets a scholarly tone by taking Dawkins argument seriously and by addressing the important philosophical issues without resorting to the dismissive rhetoric so common in today’s religious debate.

Being an argument (however badly presented), the basic assertions of this book deserve a reasoned response, even though its overall tone is more likely to elicit an emotional reaction–either a positive reaction from those who love Dawkins’ atheism or a negative reaction from those who hate it.

Novak indeed provides a reasoned response. In doing so, he articulates a key philosophical problem with Intelligent Design and offers an alternative view that I think is much more in line with traditional Judaism. (more…)

Stephen Barr has a good article in First Things about moral relativism (via Keith Burgess-Jackson). He’s responding, in part, to Robert Miller’s article - which is also worth reading. I think Barr is basically right. He explains well how modern relativsm emerged from positivism and its effect on public morality and political discourse. Barr has a philosopher’s gift for picking out key nuances in complex arguments and this article puts that skill on display. (more…)

Gary Larson, in The Prehistory of the Far Side:

[T]he key element in any attempt at humor is conflict. Our brain is suddenly jolted into trying to accept something that is unacceptable. The punch line of a joke is the part that conflicts with the first part, thereby surprising us and throwing our synapses into some kind of fire drill… And the emotional response to this kind of conflict can range from laughter to a broken nose. In any humorous vehicle (comedy, cartoons, Pintos, etc.), this conflict, whether subtle or blunt, is mandatory.

See here. The last paragraph is the most powerful. A more thorough post on the retributivist theory of justice is in the works. I basically agree with Lewis but there’s at least one compelling argument Lewis doesn’t make that I want to explore. Stay tuned.

This week’s NYTimes Magazine has an interesting article about soft paternalism. In the course of offering a few different approaches, writer Jim Holt explains the theory of “multiple selves”.

You might naïvely imagine that you are one person, the same entity from day to day. To the 18th-century philosopher David Hume, however, the idea of a permanent “I” was a fiction. Our mind, Hume wrote, “is nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” According to this way of thinking, the self that inhabits your body today is only similar to, not identical with, the self that is going to inhabit your body tomorrow. And the self that will inhabit your body decades hence? A virtual stranger.

The implication here is that my current self has no right to restrict the behavior of my future self and use the law to help me. It’s an interesting approach that I have to think more about before passing judgment. But the article follows with a flawed argument to support it. (more…)

See Johnny-Dee’s take on the I-don’t-even-know-what-that-means objection. I agree with him that it can be and is overused but there’s some merit to rejecting a position if it can’t be coherently expressed. Insofar as language necessarily shapes my thinking, I can’t accept an idea that language itself cannot capture.

R. Natan Slifkin points outs a key problem with intelligent design in his Jerusalem Post article (via Hirhurim). It’s quite good and I think he’s right.

The “randomness” of Darwinian evolution is no more antithetical to religion than the superficially chance events of the Book of Esther, which we ascribe to God’s salvation, or the randomness of a lottery, about which it states in Proverbs 16:33, “When the lot is cast in the lap, its entire verdict has been decided by God.”

For as long as I’ve been blogging, I’ve been commenting on the seemingly endless array of “Torah & Science” posts, as well as writing some of my own. But in none of my previous comments or posts have I really expressed my thoughts in a comprehensive way. So for what it’s worth, I want to lay out what I think is the real dilemma evolution presents for religion and offer an approach I find compelling, even if incomplete.
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In light of last week’s election, I want to reflect on a common refrain I heard from friends and relatives justifying not voting: “My vote doesn’t count.” Why bother going to the polls if your district or state is overwhelmingly loyal to only one party? There are a number of good responses to the lazy non-voter argument. Some point out that if you don’t take the time to vote, you don’t deserve to complain about inefficient or complacent government (and of course, everybody wants a right to complain). Others point out, a la Kant, that we ought to do what we think everybody should do and if nobody voted, then clearly democracy couldn’t function. (Attention philosophy pedants: Yes, Kant’s categorical imperative is more complex than that. Deal with it.)

The response I’m most interested in is the one that characterizes voting as a duty. Democracy assumes that individuals know what their own interests are better than anyone else and that government ought to serve the interests of its electorate. Without those assumptions, I don’t think democracy can even get off the ground. If more people vote, then more interests are represented by the result of the election and the government is better able to serve its electorate. For every person who votes, then, the government is that much better equipt to do its job.

Benjamin N. Cardozo in The Nature of Judicial Process:

[E]very one of us has in truth an underlying philosophy of life, even those of us to whom the names and the notions of philosophy are unknown or anathema. There is in each of us a stream of tendency, whether you choose to call it philosophy or not, which gives coherence and direction to thought and action. Judges cannot escape that current any more than other mortals. All their lives, forces which they do not recognize and cannot name, have been tugging at them - inherited instincts, traditional beliefs, acquired convictions; and the resultant is an outlook on life, a conception of social needs, a sense in James’s phrase of “the total push and pressure of the cosmos,” which, when reasons are nicely balanced, must determine where choice shall fall. In this mental background every problem finds its setting.

In the comments to her post about her son’s atheism, Dr. B writes:

I think that the argument that we should believe in god in order to make ourselves be good is really rather blasphemous. God ought to be an end, rather than a means, by definition.

She’s responding to a commenter who doubted the sincerity of a boy that young professing to be an atheist, but the context here is secondary. I’m more interested in the statement itself. I think the idea that God must be an end is motivated by an aversion to ulterior motives. There is, perhaps, something unsettling about acting as though God is real merely because it motivates us to behave in a socially responsible way. That would reduce God to merely a useful fiction. But that doesn’t mean there’s a problem with viewing God as a means to an end; there’s a problem with viewing God as the wrong means to an end.

Belief in God and Torah is, in fact, a means to an end, but to a far more loftly end: a life of holiness. Believing in God because we want to share in His holiness isn’t an ulterior motive. It’s the whole point.

In Newsweek’s “My Turn” column, philosopher Erik Wielenberg offers a witty and largely accurate take on what exactly professional philosophers do and the significance it has.

We can trace our lineage back to a man who, while on trial for his life, informed his judges that an unexamined life is not worth living and that he would not stop practicing philosophy as long as he could draw breath. What got him into trouble was speaking truth to power, and he later drank poison rather than betray the principles to which his reasoning had led him.

In the long run, he was victorious: today every educated person knows the name of Socrates, while few know much about the government that executed him. We philosophers can also point out that whatever your most cherished institution or ideal—representative democracy, the free-market economy, even Christianity—it would not exist if no one engaged in the mysterious work of philosophy. I once overheard a student remark that philosophy professors are the “renegades of society.”

Because it’s been a while since I last quoted the Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella:

Doubt is the engine of inquiry. But inquiry ultimately rests on faith, faith that there is something to be known, something that lies beyond our shifting experiences… [T]here must be faith to assure us that there is an object of inquiry. Otherwise, doubt turns in upon itself and consumes itself. Doubt should serve the purpose of inquiry into what is transcendent of our shifting experiences; it is not an end in itself.

In an old post, about a year ago, I suggested that Originalism with respect to constitutional interpretation is fundamentally different from an traditional approach to interpreting Halakhah. Here’s the relevant excerpt:

The Torah itself is God’s message to humanity and thus, interpreting the Torah is inextricably tied to interpreting God’s will or intention. Consider an analogy: Somebody writes you a rather vague letter. In trying to make sense of the letter itself, you’re also trying to figure out what the author had in mind while writing it. You can’t separate those two tasks.

The Constitution, on the other hand, is not simply the will of James Madison or of the members of Constitutional Convention. The relationship of Madison’s intention with the text of the Constitution is incidental.

George objects to my distinction. In a recent email (it’s actually not so recent but I procrastinated responding to him), he writes:

how is the constitution not simply the will of the cont[i]nental congress (representing the will of the nation). if it is how it that diffrent from reading and interpreting a letter a friend sent you?

The key difference between the Constitution as “the will of the [C]ont[i]nental [C]ongress” and Halakhah as God’s will is one of justification. The Torah’s authority is justified by God having commanded it. (That’s an oversimplification but I don’t want to get into the Euthyphro dilemma right now.) The goal of interpreting the Torah (and, by extension, Halakhah in general) is to identify what message God intends to convey because what justifies it is God intending to convey it. Interpreting a letter from a friend is similar insofar as the goal is to figure out what my friend wants to tell me. The letter would have no function otherwise.

The Constitution, on the other hand, does not derive its authority from James Madison or the Continental Congress. Had it been written by a 10-year-old who was bored one day during math class and then ratified by the states, it would have the same status that it has today.

R. Soloveitchik in The Lonely Man of Faith:

[M]an is faced with an exasperating paradox. On the one hand, he beholds God in every nook and corner of creation, in the flowering of the plant, in the rushing of the tide, and in the movement of his own muscle, as if God were at hand close to and beside man, engaging him in a friendly dialogue. And yet the very moment man turns to face God he finds Him remote, unapproachable… enveloped in the cloud of mystery, winking to him from the awesome ‘beyond.’ Therefore, the man of faith, in order to redeem himself from his loneliness and misery, must meet God at a personal covenantal level, where he can be near Him and feel free in His presence.”

Law professor Geoffrey R. Stone makes the following observation in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune:

Perhaps you noticed an interesting confluence of events on July 19. On that day, President Bush vetoed legislation that would have authorized the expanded use of federal funds for stem-cell research, the House of Representatives voted to enact legislation depriving the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear any case challenging the constitutionality of the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, and the House voted to purchase a municipal park in San Diego on which a 29-foot-high cross stands.

What these three acts have in common is a reckless disregard for the fundamental American aspiration to keep church and state separate

To be sure, I’m all for keeping church and state far away from each other but one of the three examples Stone points to doesn’t belong. The phrase “under God” has, at least, religious connotations, as does a giant cross standing in a state-owned park. But the ethics of stem-cell research? (more…)

It clear that Halakhah requires Jews to behave towards non-Jews in a manner consistent with the Torah’s ethical demands. What’s less clear is the reason for this. The Mishnah writes (Gittin 59a-b):

…One does not restrain poor pagans from collecting the gleanings, forgotton pieces and what is left on the corners of fields mipnei darkhei shalom (on account of the ways of peace).

The Gemara, there (61a), expands, based on a beraita:

One supports poor non-Jews together with poor Israelites, and one visits sick non-Jews together with sick Israelites, and one buries dead non-Jews as one buries dead Israelites mipnei darkhei shalom.

What does “mipnei darkhei shalom” mean? (more…)

The latest Philosophers’ Carnival is up at the boundaries of language, featuring my post, “Patriotism as Gratitude“.

Jill quotes George Bernard Shaw: “Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.” One difficulty with patriotism, like any kind of particularism, is that it seems arbitrary. By patriotism here, I refer to the ethical obligations that stem from loyalty to one’s country. I’m leaving aside, for the moment, what exactly these ethical obligations are and how far they extend. My concern is the more fundamental question: How can patriotism be justified at all? I take for granted the assumption that all human beings have the same intrinsic moral worth. I suppose you may deny this and build your patriotism around a Nazi-style racism but I’m going to let the moral bankruptcy of such a position speak for itself and proceed as though it doesn’t exist. (In a later post, I may take up the question of what exactly is wrong with Nazi “ethics” because I enjoy asking philosophical questions about patently absurd positions and trying to tease out the precise flaw.)

To answer our question, let’s examine patriotism’s close relative: familial loyalty.
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R. Marvin Fox, in “Heschel, Intuition, and the Halakhah”, is critical of what he considers an over-reliance on intuition in R. Heschel’s philosophy of religion. The common objection to any intuition-based theory, as Fox argues, “is that we have no reliable way to distinguish between those experiences which are genuine perceptions of a higher reality and experiences which are delusions or hallucinations.” Perhaps more important, though, is Fox’s second objection. The kind of awe-inspiring, life-changing experiences that Heschel has in mind are limited to prophets and, at best, the great religious personalities of each generation. “A conception of religion which is rooted in such experiences automatically restricts the realm of faith to a small group of the spiritually elite.”

According to Fox, Heschel offers three ways for achieving such intuition. He paraphrases Heschel as follows: “Man can come to a knowledge of God by sensing His presence in the world, in things… sensing His presence in the Bible… [and] sensing his presence in sacred deeds”. The problem with the first two, as Fox points out (I think, correctly), is that they are only available to the already-believing individual (again, the spiritually elite). (more…)

How do your ethical commitments match up with the philosophers of the Western Tradition (via Johnny-Dee)? I’m pretty comfortable identifying with Kant, Augustine, & Aquinas as far as ethics is concerned. I’m a little surprised to have so much in common with Sartre and Spinoza, though. Plato should be higher up there too.

Your Results:

	1.	Kant   (100%)  Click here for info
	2.	St. Augustine   (88%)  Click here for info
	3.	Aquinas   (83%)  Click here for info
	4.	Jean-Paul Sartre   (80%)  Click here for info
	5.	Spinoza   (76%)  Click here for info
	6.	Ockham   (74%)  Click here for info
	7.	Aristotle   (71%)  Click here for info
	8.	Jeremy Bentham   (71%)  Click here for info
	9.	Prescriptivism   (71%)  Click here for info
	10.	John Stuart Mill   (71%)  Click here for info
	11.	Ayn Rand   (69%)  Click here for info
	12.	Stoics   (62%)  Click here for info
	13.	Nietzsche   (61%)  Click here for info
	14.	Epicureans   (56%)  Click here for info
	15.	Nel Noddings   (54%)  Click here for info
	16.	Plato   (51%)  Click here for info
	17.	David Hume   (50%)  Click here for info
	18.	Cynics   (33%)  Click here for info
	19.	Thomas Hobbes   (16%)  Click here for info

Marco, at El Blog de Marcos (via Philosophers’ Carnival), entertains the possibility of God-dependant morality while avoiding the Euthyphro dilemma. (I don’t really like Wikipedia’s summary but it’ll suffice for now. I’ve also written on the topic here and here. Even better, read the dialogue and decide for yourself.) Here’s Marco’s suggestion:

[W]hat if we see God as decreeing the particular laws he does for non-moral reasons (i.e. reasons other than those like ‘… is wrong)? This avoids the dispensability-of-God problem as well as the arbitrariness problem.

In fact, it avoids neither problem because it fails to account for God’s motivation for “decreeing the particular laws [H]e does for non-moral reasons”. Let’s say God decrees a law for non-moral reasond r. Did God choose non-moral reason r by throwing dice or is there a deeper motivation? If the former, arbitrariness stares us in the face. If the latter, non-moral reason r becomes irrelavent and the original dilemma returns.
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The latest Philosophers’ Carnival is up at Adventures in Ethics and Science. Enjoy.

Update: Judging from a quick glance, it looks like there are a few entries that I’d like to respond to here. Hopefully, I’ll get to them within the next couple days. Stay tuned.

Maverick philosopher, Bill Vallicella, has been has dishing out more aphorisms than usual during the past week. I suggest going over there and taking a look. While I’m certainly not one to shy away from long, convoluted, philosophical treatises, the aphorism has a unique way of expressing complex ideas in deceptively simple language, which I greatly admire.

Philosophers’ Carnival #31 is up at blog.kennypearce.net, featuring my post on selective prosecution.

One of the common cases made against capital punishment is that it is too-often enforced unequally along racial and socio-economic lines. In response to this, Ernest van den Haag (”In Defense of the Death Penalty”) offers an argument that I think has implications for a more general issue in philosophy of law, namely the problem of selective prosecution. (more…)

The 30th Philosophers’ Carnival is up at anniemiz.

In an interview with AlterNet, atheist Sam Harris makes a point that’s worth addressing (via Piny).

[Y]ou have people talking about just wanting meaning in their lives, which I argue is a total non-sequitur when it comes down to justifying your belief in God.

If I told you that I thought there was a diamond the size of a refrigerator buried in my backyard, and you asked me, why do you think that? I say, this belief gives my life meaning, or my family draws a lot of joy from this belief, and we dig for this diamond every Sunday and we have this gigantic pit in our lawn. I would start to sound like a lunatic to you.

He’s right that he would sound like a lunatic but I think the analogy is off. There’s no reason to for me to believe in a giant diamond in my backyard and the kind of satisfaction one may draw from this kind of belief is superficial. No great mystery is solved by positing its existence.

Yet, most of us naturally recognize meaning and purpose as inherent in the world. We recognize that despite the disasters and tragedies we read about daily, the world is good and goodness is not something that can result from a string of random genetic mutations and mysterious explosions. As I’ve argued before, if morality is to have any force, it must be, in a deep sense, built-in to the fabric of the universe.

None of this requires a leap of faith or belief in the irrational. The basic claim of religion responds to a very powerful human intuition that goodness is not random. When a religious tradition provides a compelling explanation for the role of goodness in the world and our relationship with that goodness, the rational individual ought to take notice. Is it the only explanation? Of course not. But I think it’s the best one.

Over Shabbat, I decided to reread R. Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man. I think it’s been two years or so since I last read it (aside from referencing passages now and then). While The Lonely Man of Faith may still have a special place in my heart, Halakhic Man is an absolutely mind-blowing account of how the religious personality uses the Halakhah as a lens through which to behold the world. In fact, these two seminal essays should probably be read in light of each other and I may explore that possibility in a later post. The essay’s stated aim

is to penetrate deep into the structure of halakhic man’s consciousness and to determine the precise nature of this “strange, singular” being who reveals himself to the world from within his narrow, constricted “four cubits” [Berakhot 8a], his hands soiled by the gritty realia of practical Halakhah [see Berakhot 4a].

Later in Part I, R. Soloveitchik introduces his protaganist more fully:

When halakhic man approaches reality, he comes with his Torah, given to him from Sinai, in hand. He orients himself to the world by means of fixed statutes and firm principles. An entire corpus of precepts and laws guides him along the path leading to existence. Halakhic man, well furnished with rules, judgments, and fundamental principles, draws near the world with an a priori relation. His approach begins with an ideal creation and concludes with a real one. To whom may he be compared. To a mathematician who fashions an ideal world and then uses it for the purpose of establishing a relationship between it and the real world…

The 29th Philosophers’ Carnival is up at Daylight Atheism, featuring my first ever philosophers-carnival post!

Richard Posner argues that income inequality is a likely byproduct of a competitive and meritocratic society because of a more basic inequality among people “that is due to differences in IQ, energy, health, social skills, character, ambition, physical attractiveness, talent, and luck”. Yet government programs that seek to limit this inequality often have the effect of reducing total wealth by discouraging work. Posner then weighs the social advantages of greater total wealth against greater income equality. The major assumption at work here is that if wealth distribution is justified, then it is justified because it has a social advantage. Posner seems to associate “social advantage” with “political stability” and lack of “envy or social unrest”.

I think, though, that it’s far more promising to justify wealth distribution along moral lines. (The Torah is pretty clear that tzedakah is a moral, not merely a socio-political, issue but that’s a topic for another post.) (more…)

Vegetarianism poses an interesting challenge from a philosophical perspective because it forces the moral theorist to distinguish, on a fundamental level, between human and non-human animals. As far as I know, nobody (even PETA) argues that non-human animals (hereafter “animals”) deserve the same treatment as human beings. On one hand, raising the moral status of animals makes it more difficult to justify such an innocuous practice as owning a pet. I assume most pet-owners would oppose reinstituing the slave trade. Yet, most of us instinctively recoil at the thought of brutally tortuing animals for pleasure.

In this context, Rik Hine’s argument for vegetarianism is refreshing (even if unsound) because it appreciates the ambiguity involved. Taking a page from William James, he argues that “the debate about eating non-human animals is living, momentous and forced.” Despite the fact that, as he concedes, we can’t render a verdict regarding the moral status of animals, we ought to refrain from eating them anyway. In a Pascal-style argument, Hine suggests that we put ourselves in the shoes of a gambler.

(1) If we continue to eat meat when it’s a live option that this might be immoral and it turns out, in fact, to be the case, then we have committed a serious moral wrong.

(2) If, on the other hand, we decide to stop eating meat and it turns out to be morally permissible then the worst harm we have committed is to deprive ourselves of a particular gustatory pleasure.

(3) If we continue to eat meat and it is morally permissible then nothing of ethical significance rests on this result, and likewise,

(4) if we refrain from eating meat when continuing would be unethical, then we have simply acted as we ought to.
…
It seems to me, ultimately, that the issue can be reduced to the potential harms proposed in (1) and (2). The severity of the respective harms, in this case, are so clearly asymmetric that we would be simply astonished if the gambler placed his chips on (1). Analogously, then, I would conclude that unless or until we are epistemologically able to access a definitive answer about the actual moral status of killing non-human animals, we are in the same position and, as in (2), we should cease to eat meat.

The obvious advantage of this argument is in its determining the relevant ethical behavior without taking a definite stand on the moral status of animals. It’s important to note, though, that Hine doesn’t conclude that eating meat is immoral but rather that we should refrain from eating meat because it might be. But are we morally obligated to refrain from activities that merely might be immoral? And if so, what is the significance of something that “might be immoral” if it’s immediately transformed into flat-out “immoral”? In the case of eating meat the possible offense is even more indirect. The meat-eater is merely benefitting from a possibly immoral activity. Even if I accept Hine’s assumption that one is obligated to refrain from possibly immoral activities, it would be too weak an obligation to extend to eating meat in general.

Keith at Summa Philosophiae surveys J. P. Moreland’s argument for substance dualism (via Philosophers’ Carnival). The first premise is that there are subjective experiences that require indexical (first-person) language and thus, are not reducible to third-person characterizations. As support for this claim, Moreland points to the unique nature of self-knowledge. If indeed there are fundamentally privileged first-person perspectives, then physicalism, which implies that everything is “exhaustively describable from a third-person point of view in terms of objects, properties, processes, and their spatiotemporal locations”, is false. Keith offers the following formal argument:

(1) Statements using the first-person indexical ‘I’ express facts about persons that cannot be expressed in statements without the first-person indexical.

(2) If I am a physical object, then all the facts about me can be expressed in statements without the first-person indexical.

(3) Therefore, I am not a physical object.

(4) I am either a physical object or an immaterial substance.

(5) Therefore, I am an immaterial substance.

Announcing the new Philosophers’ Carnival at University of No Where

From Ronald Dworkin’s Law’s Empire (p. 192):

[S]ome political philosophers have been tempted to say that we have in fact agreed to a social contract of that kind tacitly, by just not emigrating when we reach the age of consent. But no one can argue that very long with a straight face.

From Seinfeld, “The Airport“:

[George and Kramer are on their way to pick up Jerry and Elaine from the airport]

Kramer: …I never got the money back! He screwed me! And that’s the guy– John Grossbard!

George: Hey Kramer, c’mon– it was 240 bucks twenty years ago…

Kramer: No, I’m gonna turn around… I’m gonna get that guy…

George: No-no-no, Kramer. Kramer! Kramer! You *cannot* abandon people in the middle of an airport pickup! It’s a binding social contract.

I see a bright future for political philosophies based on airport pickups as the paradigm for just government.

R. Soloveitchik often emphasizes the indepedence of religious or halakhic concepts and the danger of “translating” such concepts into the respective languages of science and philosophy. He believed, and I strongly agree, that many conflicts between science and Torah (evolutionary theory is the most popular but there are many) stem from misunderstanding this point. In The Halakhic Mind (pp. 47-50), the Rav offers the concept of time as an illustration.

There is the question of God in His full transcendence beyond time, and God in His immanence in time. This problem does not only bear upon the idea of God but also upon the idea of time. God in the temporal world presents the composite of time and eternity; it implies the intrusion of eterninty upon temporality…

In this connection, the problem of the calender bears some investigation. The division of time into days, weeks, months, and years is quite incongruous with the time concept of the scientist for whom time is a continuum with no milestone. The seasons of the year or the astronomic phenomena of sunrise and sunset do not, in the least, determine the character of time. On the contrary, like other phenomena they occur in time. The religious type, in his experience of this category, indentifies the incessant flux of the chronos with the artificial form of the calender… He sees God not only in eternity but also in time quantified and measured by the calender.

The specific religious apprehension of time as cyclic motion or as an eternal repetition (Kierkegaard) is likewise utterly unintelligible to the scientist who measures spatialized time or to the metaphysician who views time as a directed flow. The experience of time as repetition is rooted in the typically religious time-awareness and is closely associated with the concept of the calender that is indeed pure repetition.
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[Here, R. Soloveitchik works out the details of how the religious ideas of Creation, Revelation, and repentence bear out this theory of time]

It must be understood that these time concepts are not mere fantasy. They are inherent in the religious consciousness which apprehends time in its own fashion.

I took one course in philosophy of time and I found it to be the most difficult sub-discipline in philosophy. Every once in a while, I think I have a grasp of some of the keys issues, only to be utterly confused a short while later. Philosophy students will know what I’m talking about. Alan Rhoda has a post up about Presentism, the view that the present is coextensive with the real, and tries to respond to an important objection from Robin Le Poidevin by “ground[ing] truths about the past in God’s memories”. He promises “to reflect more on that in a succeeding post.”

In his review of R. Soloveitchik’s The Emergence of Ethical Man, Haim Watzman (via Hirhurim) puts his finger on the most irritating part of the evolution-vs-intellegent-design debate.

The lines in the case of God v. Darwin could not be clearer. Counsel for the party of the first part claims that the principle of evolution by natural selection cannot be transcendentally true because it reserves no place for God. Counsel for the party of the second part does not dispute the fact that there is no place for God in biology. However, it draws a different conclusion—God at best simply does not exist; at worst, He is responsible for error and superstition.

Like a lawsuit, a public debate doesn’t encourage subtle reasoning. To win over public opinion, each side needs to present its case clearly and simply. Ambiguities are dangerous because they can be read as weakness or uncertainty.

For R. Soloveitchik, there is no contradiction between “divine creation and mechanistic evolution as such”. The problem, rather, is the seeming irreconcilability of “man as the bearer of the divine image with the equality of man and animal-plant existences.” It’s this subtle distinction that is lost in the public debate and it’s worth thinking about seriously. As R. Soloveitchik argues in several places, our rabbis were well aware of the tension between man-as-animal and man-as-divine-being. Watzman summarizes R. Soloveitchik’s approach as follows:

[T]he puzzle is that we are ethical beings. We encounter the physical world just as plants and animals do—that is, we have physical needs, desires, and instincts. Yet, unlike other beings, we can think about the world and consider our actions. We can resist our instincts, understand them, understand the desires and actions of other human beings. It is this difference that Rabbi Soloveitchik seeks to understand, through a consideration of our biological characteristics, the biblical creation story, and the halakhic tradition.
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[The Emergence of Ethical Man] takes you directly into a great mind as it considers arguments, analyzes concepts, and strives to develop a cogent account of how a transcendent God can act within a physical world that runs according to a set of natural laws that can be deduced through scientific activity.