My support for Israel over the Palestinians has to do with stuff like:
Which country has medicinal marijuana?
Which country has civil unions for same-sex couples?
Which country allows me to write an editorial screaming about corruption in the ruling party? Heh, no. I'm just kidding about that one.
Which country allows me to buy an issue of Playboy?
It seems to me that Israel is a lot more "rock and roll".
Under the auspices of "we, as a society, have a responsibility to act morally toward those who need us to take care of them in the absence of their being able to take care of themselves!", one can justify bombing people. One can justify wealth transfers from the middle class to corporations.
All you have to do is embrace the moral argument to the exclusion of the pragmatic one.
If someone points out that intervention worked very well in, say, Japan as justification for intervention in Iraq... Is it relevant for the opposition to point out the gulf that exists between Japan and Iraq?
If someone points out that Denmark provides universal health care as an argument for how it's possible for a society to care for those who cannot care for themselves... Is it relevant for the opposition to point out the gulf that exists between the system that Denmark has and Congress's Affordable Care Act?
I ask because I remember in the run-up to the passage of that bill written by insurance companies having dead bodies shaken in my face... I remember folks being asked whether they would save the lives of these dead children if it meant the passage of a bill completely unlike the one being discussed in Congress.
And now, I suppose, I want to ask you similar questions to see what your answers are.
E.D., don't we, as a society, have a responsibility to help people who cannot help themselves? When a dictator is slaughtering his own citizens, shouldn't we try to stop him from doing so? He's used air power on groups of peacefully protesting human beings. Air power! If you were one of those crowds peacefully assembling and exercising your human right to free speech and petition your government for redress of grievances, wouldn't you want someone like the US to prevent Gadaffi from killing your children, your family, your friends, from killing you?
It's because the fundamental problem with moral arguments is that someone just a little bit more eloquent than you (not *YOU* you, but, the person making the argument) can come up with another moral argument on the opposite side and now, guess what? You're the immoral person making the immoral argument.
By making a moral argument in the first place, it's pretty much conceded that this is *NOT* a matter of taste but a matter of morality. Surely a moral person would want to stand on the side of Right, Justice, and Goodness... wouldn't you?
So then when person just a little more eloquent shows up and points out that, nope, the Right, Just, and Good position is the one that says that we, as a society, have a responsibility to protect those who cannot, for whatever reason, protect themselves... you're suddenly the jerkwad who is arguing against that.
And, as you've pointed out, we'll see arguments used just days before in favor of *THIS* policy being abandoned only to be picked up by the opposition to be used in favor of *THAT* policy. Today we take the side of the weak against the strong in the name of the higher moral duty of intervention, tomorrow we take the side of the strong against the weak in the name of the even higher moral duty of non-intervention... and, soon thereafter, we question the bona fides of those who would question whether we're playing fast and loose with moral arguments.
If P has not worked the last X times it has been attempted, it seems to me that the argument that we have a moral responsibility to P is really saying "we have a moral responsibility to fail to P!"
Given our track record, we're downright incontinent.
Well, this is why I put so much emphasis on negative rights and hedge oh-so-much about positive rights.
Which, of course, brings us back to weighing the differences between "provision of affordable health care" and "stopping a murderer from killing men, women, children"... my inclination is to say that *IF* we have a positive duty to do anything, we have a positive duty toward the latter.
But how does the world work?
Did our attempt work in Iraq? If not, why do we think it will work here? Making appeals to the right thing to do without taking into account past performance is negligence at best.
The problem with Deontology *IN PRACTICE* is that it presents functionally identically with not actually having to do anything but merely saying that somebody should.
And once one has communicated that something ought to be done, one can then shrug as if one has done one's part.
Indeed, it is not works that saves us but *FAITH*.
Meanwhile, Martha's the one in the kitchen cooking and everybody's mooning over how devout Mary is.
When we make room for a moral framework, the cost of not doing anything is weighed against the wonderful outcome of going in there like White SuperJesus and yelling "Peace Be Still" and having everybody actually listen and hold hands on their way to a drum circle.
And then people ask, pointedly, "Don't you think that people *SHOULD* hold hands and go to a drum circle? Instead of killing and raping each other?"
The drums are over there, E.C.
Hop to it. I'm sure you'll be greeted as a White SuperJesus.
Yeah, I know. You didn't mean "you". You meant me.
Country P says "X needs to be done!"
Country Q says "X needs to be done!"
Country R says "X needs to be done!"
Country S says "Can't someone else just do X?"
Obviously, we need to criticize Country S for not getting with the program rather than countries P, Q, and R for not just doing X.
(Now, in this particular case, it looks like countries P, Q, and R *ARE* doing X. More power to them. Let's hope that they learned a thing or three from watching Iraq and compare/contrast with the thing or three that they learned from watching Bosnia. I don't see why S is required to be involved.)
No, Heidegger. I was cheering on Operation Iraqi Freedom. I was arguing that we, as a society, have a responsibility to others. We have a responsibility to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves, to protect those who cannot protect themselves, and to midwife the birth of a self-determined country (rather than the tyranny that existed) because the desire for Human Freedom beats in the heart of every man and we, as a society, have a responsibility to free slaves wherever we may find them.
If you are someone who wants the government to meddle domestically but not internationally, you are a liberal.
If you are someone who wants the government to meddle internationally but not domestically, you are a conservative.
If you are someone who wants the government to meddle domestically and internationally, you are a moderate.
If you don't want the government to meddle anywhere you are an extremist.
Weel, in the past few months, we've seen Congress's Affordable Care Act, the Union Thingamabob in Wisconsin, and "unrest" in the Middle East with an added bonus of a third country in which we are officially lobbing missiles.
Moderates ought to be pleased.
In any case, I'm someone who doesn't much like Congress's Affordable Care Act, Public Sector Unions, or using the military the way I cheered it when I was cheering on Iraq (hoo, boy)... but when I think about the positive/negative rights argument we've been having and the whole moral obligation thing and the example of someone drowning and whether we save them at little to no cost to us, it seems like killing a dictator who is killing his own people is the most obvious analogue to helping a drowning man out.
If you could kill someone who is murdering people at little to no cost to you, would you?
(Now, of course, the punchline is that we won't end up only playing a limited role. We'll have boots on the ground before long and "little to no cost to you" means about the same thing as when someone says it in a commercial.)
Yeah, but the aggregate action part wasn't in the the quotes part.
You also touched on the prison system, which might address the question of what we do with others who would decrease moral agency.
Yeah, to say we ought to abolish it! To say that we needed to abandon this particular aggregate action because it was worse than doing nothing.
The question I’ve been mulling around, and which I posed in a hypothetical if it ever makes it into the guest posts, is what we do with our police.
Want my take? Here it is.
If I do not feel that I would be justified to X, I don't see how the police could be justified to X. So if I would not be justified to kick down your door and make you stop playing poker, I don't see how the police can be justified to do that.
This also works when I swap out "the government" for "the police". "The army" works too.
If we had a guarantee that no one would die (completely false of course) in military intervention in Libya, would we still feel on the fence about it?
What if we knew that it would end up exactly like Iraq? We'd be there for a decade, people would hate us, and we'd lose soldiers to IEDs like clockwork. Would we still be on the fence about it?
I don't know... it seems obvious to me that there are matters of taste and matters of morality and the biggest problems come when one is mistaken for the other. Co-incidentally, it seems like the lion's share of such mistakes are one way... that is, a matter of taste is mistaken for a matter of morality (though the other way has some doozies!).
More than that, there are many notable attempts to rectify these matters of morality (we have a responsibility, after all) that have resulted in *HUGE* piles of bodies that are bigger than the ones created by the original problem in the first place. (See, for example, Iraq's Liberation, the War on Drugs, Applied Communism, and so on.)
When there are questions or blurry things going on, it seems to me like we'd be better off not barging in and making things better through application of force.
It doesn't always end up as nice and clean and neat as the Civil War did.
I suppose a better comparison might be to pre-natal chakra activation. If I were someone who did not believe in chakras, it does not necessarily follow that I would be uninterested in prenatal chakra activation.
That's one of those things when one hears about it, one wants to learn more even if one is skeptical (even if one does not believe at all).
Oh, I don't think I ever got to government stuff. The limitation to the essay is that it's stuck on the individual and never even moved up to the aggregate except to complain about the solutions that get provided by aggregate action. (I'd probably say that since the moral wrongs done by groups are socialized that the losses tend to be greater than if there were an individual who was responsible. See, for example: Corporations.)
Now would you say that we have an obligation to increase moral agency? Or only an obligation not to allow it to be decreased?
I'd say an obligation to not decrease it.
"But what if someone else is decreasing it! Don't we have an obligation to stop them?"
Hoo boy. I dunno.
"What about children? They can't be responsible for themselves yet."
Yeah. I know. I don't know how to deal with that either.
And here I was thinking that the personality type description from the "You're Scary Spice! Rrrrawr!" answer from the "Which Spice Girl Are You?" quiz was never going to be topped.
I don't know that all morality is based in convention either.
It would make sense to me that it would be and that even the most successful organisms has some vestigial parts... but that's deeply unsatisfying (and the downsides of being wrong include being wrong about the existence of morality).
On “On Libya and the Moral Case Against Intervention”
My support for Israel over the Palestinians has to do with stuff like:
Which country has medicinal marijuana?
Which country has civil unions for same-sex couples?
Which country allows me to write an editorial screaming about corruption in the ruling party? Heh, no. I'm just kidding about that one.
Which country allows me to buy an issue of Playboy?
It seems to me that Israel is a lot more "rock and roll".
On “The bad logic of intervention in Libya”
Under the auspices of "we, as a society, have a responsibility to act morally toward those who need us to take care of them in the absence of their being able to take care of themselves!", one can justify bombing people. One can justify wealth transfers from the middle class to corporations.
All you have to do is embrace the moral argument to the exclusion of the pragmatic one.
If someone points out that intervention worked very well in, say, Japan as justification for intervention in Iraq... Is it relevant for the opposition to point out the gulf that exists between Japan and Iraq?
If someone points out that Denmark provides universal health care as an argument for how it's possible for a society to care for those who cannot care for themselves... Is it relevant for the opposition to point out the gulf that exists between the system that Denmark has and Congress's Affordable Care Act?
I ask because I remember in the run-up to the passage of that bill written by insurance companies having dead bodies shaken in my face... I remember folks being asked whether they would save the lives of these dead children if it meant the passage of a bill completely unlike the one being discussed in Congress.
And now, I suppose, I want to ask you similar questions to see what your answers are.
E.D., don't we, as a society, have a responsibility to help people who cannot help themselves? When a dictator is slaughtering his own citizens, shouldn't we try to stop him from doing so? He's used air power on groups of peacefully protesting human beings. Air power! If you were one of those crowds peacefully assembling and exercising your human right to free speech and petition your government for redress of grievances, wouldn't you want someone like the US to prevent Gadaffi from killing your children, your family, your friends, from killing you?
On “On Libya and the Moral Case Against Intervention”
Yeah, until they are commandments.
And we wake up to find 3% of the population in prison, on probation, or on parole.
"
It's because the fundamental problem with moral arguments is that someone just a little bit more eloquent than you (not *YOU* you, but, the person making the argument) can come up with another moral argument on the opposite side and now, guess what? You're the immoral person making the immoral argument.
By making a moral argument in the first place, it's pretty much conceded that this is *NOT* a matter of taste but a matter of morality. Surely a moral person would want to stand on the side of Right, Justice, and Goodness... wouldn't you?
So then when person just a little more eloquent shows up and points out that, nope, the Right, Just, and Good position is the one that says that we, as a society, have a responsibility to protect those who cannot, for whatever reason, protect themselves... you're suddenly the jerkwad who is arguing against that.
And, as you've pointed out, we'll see arguments used just days before in favor of *THIS* policy being abandoned only to be picked up by the opposition to be used in favor of *THAT* policy. Today we take the side of the weak against the strong in the name of the higher moral duty of intervention, tomorrow we take the side of the strong against the weak in the name of the even higher moral duty of non-intervention... and, soon thereafter, we question the bona fides of those who would question whether we're playing fast and loose with moral arguments.
"No, I asked how dare you first."
On “Leo Strauss, Meet John Stuart Mill”
What we need are the atheistic version of missionaries to go into all the world and bring Truth to people unfortunate enough to never have heard it.
Those poor Southerners! Those poor Buddhists! Those poor Muslims!
We need to go into their countries and convert them away from their backwards cultures and bring them to enlightenment.
What could possibly go wrong?
On “On Libya and the Moral Case Against Intervention”
"The Precogs are never wrong. But, occasionally, they do disagree."
"
My opinion of puns is very, very low.
I thought that the point of having only moral considerations would be that we're able to ignore stuff that we know, at this time.
We can just make sweeping statements about the importance of saving Mohammed's life.
"
If P has not worked the last X times it has been attempted, it seems to me that the argument that we have a moral responsibility to P is really saying "we have a moral responsibility to fail to P!"
Given our track record, we're downright incontinent.
"
Well, this is why I put so much emphasis on negative rights and hedge oh-so-much about positive rights.
Which, of course, brings us back to weighing the differences between "provision of affordable health care" and "stopping a murderer from killing men, women, children"... my inclination is to say that *IF* we have a positive duty to do anything, we have a positive duty toward the latter.
But how does the world work?
Did our attempt work in Iraq? If not, why do we think it will work here? Making appeals to the right thing to do without taking into account past performance is negligence at best.
"
The hurdle of the world working the way it works in spite of positive visualization?
That ain't a hurdle, it's a limit.
"
The problem with Deontology *IN PRACTICE* is that it presents functionally identically with not actually having to do anything but merely saying that somebody should.
And once one has communicated that something ought to be done, one can then shrug as if one has done one's part.
Indeed, it is not works that saves us but *FAITH*.
Meanwhile, Martha's the one in the kitchen cooking and everybody's mooning over how devout Mary is.
Feh.
"
When we make room for a moral framework, the cost of not doing anything is weighed against the wonderful outcome of going in there like White SuperJesus and yelling "Peace Be Still" and having everybody actually listen and hold hands on their way to a drum circle.
And then people ask, pointedly, "Don't you think that people *SHOULD* hold hands and go to a drum circle? Instead of killing and raping each other?"
The drums are over there, E.C.
Hop to it. I'm sure you'll be greeted as a White SuperJesus.
Yeah, I know. You didn't mean "you". You meant me.
"
See it as analogous to the "chickenhawk" argument then.
If you want blood and treasure poured into North Africa, pour your own.
When you, yourself, don't have to pay any price, it's easy to make an analogy to someone saving someone else's life at little to no cost.
"
Country P says "X needs to be done!"
Country Q says "X needs to be done!"
Country R says "X needs to be done!"
Country S says "Can't someone else just do X?"
Obviously, we need to criticize Country S for not getting with the program rather than countries P, Q, and R for not just doing X.
(Now, in this particular case, it looks like countries P, Q, and R *ARE* doing X. More power to them. Let's hope that they learned a thing or three from watching Iraq and compare/contrast with the thing or three that they learned from watching Bosnia. I don't see why S is required to be involved.)
"
No, Heidegger. I was cheering on Operation Iraqi Freedom. I was arguing that we, as a society, have a responsibility to others. We have a responsibility to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves, to protect those who cannot protect themselves, and to midwife the birth of a self-determined country (rather than the tyranny that existed) because the desire for Human Freedom beats in the heart of every man and we, as a society, have a responsibility to free slaves wherever we may find them.
Hoo boy.
"
That's one of the jokes I made when Dubya was president.
"Conservatives are finally agitating for a one-world government."
"
There is an old joke.
If you are someone who wants the government to meddle domestically but not internationally, you are a liberal.
If you are someone who wants the government to meddle internationally but not domestically, you are a conservative.
If you are someone who wants the government to meddle domestically and internationally, you are a moderate.
If you don't want the government to meddle anywhere you are an extremist.
Weel, in the past few months, we've seen Congress's Affordable Care Act, the Union Thingamabob in Wisconsin, and "unrest" in the Middle East with an added bonus of a third country in which we are officially lobbing missiles.
Moderates ought to be pleased.
In any case, I'm someone who doesn't much like Congress's Affordable Care Act, Public Sector Unions, or using the military the way I cheered it when I was cheering on Iraq (hoo, boy)... but when I think about the positive/negative rights argument we've been having and the whole moral obligation thing and the example of someone drowning and whether we save them at little to no cost to us, it seems like killing a dictator who is killing his own people is the most obvious analogue to helping a drowning man out.
If you could kill someone who is murdering people at little to no cost to you, would you?
(Now, of course, the punchline is that we won't end up only playing a limited role. We'll have boots on the ground before long and "little to no cost to you" means about the same thing as when someone says it in a commercial.)
On “Toward a norm of humanitarian intervention”
My quotes part was taken from your essay.
Yeah, but the aggregate action part wasn't in the the quotes part.
You also touched on the prison system, which might address the question of what we do with others who would decrease moral agency.
Yeah, to say we ought to abolish it! To say that we needed to abandon this particular aggregate action because it was worse than doing nothing.
The question I’ve been mulling around, and which I posed in a hypothetical if it ever makes it into the guest posts, is what we do with our police.
Want my take? Here it is.
If I do not feel that I would be justified to X, I don't see how the police could be justified to X. So if I would not be justified to kick down your door and make you stop playing poker, I don't see how the police can be justified to do that.
This also works when I swap out "the government" for "the police". "The army" works too.
If we had a guarantee that no one would die (completely false of course) in military intervention in Libya, would we still feel on the fence about it?
What if we knew that it would end up exactly like Iraq? We'd be there for a decade, people would hate us, and we'd lose soldiers to IEDs like clockwork. Would we still be on the fence about it?
"
I don't know... it seems obvious to me that there are matters of taste and matters of morality and the biggest problems come when one is mistaken for the other. Co-incidentally, it seems like the lion's share of such mistakes are one way... that is, a matter of taste is mistaken for a matter of morality (though the other way has some doozies!).
More than that, there are many notable attempts to rectify these matters of morality (we have a responsibility, after all) that have resulted in *HUGE* piles of bodies that are bigger than the ones created by the original problem in the first place. (See, for example, Iraq's Liberation, the War on Drugs, Applied Communism, and so on.)
When there are questions or blurry things going on, it seems to me like we'd be better off not barging in and making things better through application of force.
It doesn't always end up as nice and clean and neat as the Civil War did.
"
Morality as analogous to health?
That's an essay.
But when I think about "golf", I am uninterested.
I suppose a better comparison might be to pre-natal chakra activation. If I were someone who did not believe in chakras, it does not necessarily follow that I would be uninterested in prenatal chakra activation.
That's one of those things when one hears about it, one wants to learn more even if one is skeptical (even if one does not believe at all).
"
Oh, I don't think I ever got to government stuff. The limitation to the essay is that it's stuck on the individual and never even moved up to the aggregate except to complain about the solutions that get provided by aggregate action. (I'd probably say that since the moral wrongs done by groups are socialized that the losses tend to be greater than if there were an individual who was responsible. See, for example: Corporations.)
Now would you say that we have an obligation to increase moral agency? Or only an obligation not to allow it to be decreased?
I'd say an obligation to not decrease it.
"But what if someone else is decreasing it! Don't we have an obligation to stop them?"
Hoo boy. I dunno.
"What about children? They can't be responsible for themselves yet."
Yeah. I know. I don't know how to deal with that either.
"
And here I was thinking that the personality type description from the "You're Scary Spice! Rrrrawr!" answer from the "Which Spice Girl Are You?" quiz was never going to be topped.
"
Take the refugees in and give them a better place to be. If they want to go back and duke it out, more power to them.
You won't find a bigger fan of open borders than me.
The problem comes when there's noplace left to run to...
But that's another essay.
"
Possible? Certainly.
Sufficient? This is where I get really, really, really nervous.
"
I don't know that all morality is based in convention either.
It would make sense to me that it would be and that even the most successful organisms has some vestigial parts... but that's deeply unsatisfying (and the downsides of being wrong include being wrong about the existence of morality).