Commenter Archive

Comments by James Williams*

On “My Secularism, Unraveling

Seriously, if you're trying to think carefully through these issues, I strongly recommend Gerald Gaus, _Justificatory Liberalism_. See, e.g.,
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/onlinepapers/estlund/gausnotice.pdf

Hey, just stumbled across this, while googling for the other:
http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/23309-religious-convictions-in-liberal-politics/

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It seems to me more like: you forgot to take some of the pins out of the new shirt, and they were sticking into your skin & irritating you, but now that you've got them out, you're wearing the shirt _in exactly the way it was always meant to be worn_.

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I'm not sure I understand what the change was supposed to be here. When you write

"what God is said to have said can be assessed and judged on grounds other than the professed event of revelation. Religious belief about morality includes more than divine command ethics. See the natural law tradition, for instance"

--that just is a bog-standard commitment to secularism. Divine authority can't be appealed to in public discourse. But things that you may believe in large part due to such authority, can of course be put forward and defended in the public realm (so long, again, as divine authority isn't appealed to.)

This is just the view of public reason that you'll find defended in its canonical proponents like Rawls, Gaus, etc.

Maybe your secularism hasn't unraveled; it has simply arrived.

On “the ballad of RSM

Oh, amen, Brother Freddie, amen.

On “induction leading to abortion qualms

Your point about "human" vs. "person" is spot-on. It is worth pointing out, in such discussions, that if humanness (in the mere biological sense) is sufficient for rights, then every single cell in a human body has such rights -- including malignant cancer cells. Humanness does not make one a locus of rights; personhood does.

Regarding the main point of the post, I would note that it bears something of a resemblance to another disquieting induction: the so-called "pessimistic induction" in the philosophy of science. Since pretty much all scientific theories before this time have been revealed as false, and turned over by later developments, we should infer, inductively, that most all of current science is false. It is typically offered as an argument against scientific realism, but one might also take it to be a reason for an attitude about current science similar to the one you've expressed here about abortion rights. And so one might wonder whether we can learn anything from how to handle your case, from how we might handle the scientific case. In particular, I think it's clear that we should not take the pessimistic induction as a reason to council despair or an unproductive skepticism about today's science, but rather to motivate our maintaining a vigilant openness to novel evidence, and an openness to revision. Which indeed sounds rather like the attitude that you've adopted here.

I do think E.D. is right about the starting-at-birth thing; I would note that it is not at all a standard part of the pro-choice position to think that the fetus only has status at that late point in development.

On “the continuing fraud of Mickey Kaus

"His is the journalistic project. Air arguments. Advance conversations. Adhere to logic." Except he just plain doesn't do this.

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Freddie is right on target here. Think of there being in any such political debate, at least two things that one can be at issue: one, what particular set of positions is _acceptable_ to be debated in the first place; two, what particular position is _correct_. Positions that are within that window of acceptability, but which one disagrees with, one argues against; positions that are not even within the window of acceptability, one simply mocks, or actively conflates with other beyond-the-pale positions (as "fascist" or "socialist", etc.). Freddie's problem isn't that Kaus has argued for his brand of semi-liberalism as better than the rivals. It's that Kaus has written in such a way as to suggest that the rivals shouldn't even be seriously considered in the first place.

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An obvious disanalogy between Kaus and Larison: Larison is ruthlessly intellectually honest, and Kaus just plain isn't.

On “calling bullshit on bullshit

"Success seems to be connected to action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.” What Phil seems for some reason not up to the cognitive task of recognizing is that (i) lots and lots of not-successful people do keep moving, and remain not-successful through no fault of their own, and moreover (ii) lots of successful people are such for reasons substantially beyond their own not-stopping capacities -- it's easy to not-stop when life has placed you on the moving sidewalk to begin with, and most of all (iii) the extent of one's not-stopping capacity is itself something that is very frequently not something that is up to one's own decisions, but in significant ways a function of the social resources that surround, facilitate, and make possible such non-stopping in the first place.

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Excellent post, Freddie, and excellent last comment. I'm so glad to see that your recent hiatus from blogging was just a hiatus, and not a retirement!

On “Opportunity, Society, and the Role of the State

Rortybomb's post reminds me of one of the best ever neologisms in the history of blog punditry: "dark satanic Millian liberalism":
http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/11/dead_right.html

On “Tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury…

"The text I was referring to specifically of Dawkins’ was “The God Delusion” which does, indeed, attempt to disprove God." This isn't really an accurate reading of the book. Rather, he is disproving a very particular theistic claim: that the apparent design in the universe is in fact there because it was created by a very intelligent, very powerful being. If your religious beliefs don't license such a design inference, then you just aren't a target of the book.

I seem to have gotten crossed up with who was saying what. When I wrote, "they are doing exactly what you just said they should do — namely, show that the way that we so often defer to religious beliefs and practices is inconsistent with some of our most important values", I had in mind this from the main post: "why not people share what is of deepest value to them."

Nonetheless, I reject the sharp line you want to draw, sidereal, when you write, "It is one thing to say ‘this particular manifestation or practice is inconsistent with a free society and inconsistent with the ethical principles of your own faith’. It is another to say ‘Your faith is a delusion and is inherently poisonous to society’." Your statement of the first part of that incomplete, as it definitely needs to include not just a free society or some basic ethical principles, but also, as I noted, our best norms of epistemic rationality. And from there it is a short step to the second part: if someone's beliefs are being held in flagrant contradiction of our best norms of epistemic rationality, then their so believing is indeed cognitively not up to snuff, and it may well be dangerous to society to let such irrationalism run amock. Especially when said irrationalism wants to take over school boards.

Versions of theism that keep the religious beliefs thoroughly & completely disentangled from prediction and explanation of the physical world will not have this problem, since they do keep themselves clear of contradicting what it means to reason well based on good evidence . But such versions of theism are just not the targets of these discourses.

On “Falsifying the Unfalsifiable

re: Andrew and Consumatopia's last posts -- Here, here! I still have yet to see who it is that is supposed to be the dogmatic science-proves-atheism proponent that is the alleged target of this discussion, though I am (for the reasons Andrew notes) very dubious that it could be Dawkins. I also think, for similar reasons, that it cannot be P. Z. Meyers.

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Mark, you'd probably make better sense of what is going on with such authors (and with Dave and Ryan) if you took them not to be disagreeing with you in your main claims about the relationship between science and religion, but rather to be disagreeing with the rather large number of theists who disagree with you. There are lots of people who take there to be good epistemic reasons for theism, and pointing out that science makes no particular room for a deity -- that any such deity would have to operate entirely outside the bounds of our most valuable epistemic resource -- is a very good argument in a debate with those sorts of persons.

On “Tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury…

"Be that as it may, does anyone really think that the best mechanism of opposition to resurgent theocracy is an attempt to prove God doesn’t exist?" I think you've probably a bad interpretation of what Dawkins et al. are trying to do. (And, again, I still don't know what particular Dawkins text is being taken here as trying to "prove" God doesn't exist.) Rather, they are doing exactly what you just said they should do -- namely, show that the way that we so often defer to religious beliefs and practices is inconsistent with some of our most important values, in this case, the value of thinking practically and reasonably about the world, based on real evidence.

There's also a kind of 'window' effect here -- if there are no visible strong atheistic positions in the public discourse, then it will continue to seem like a position that is simply beyond the pale. By saying so loudly, "no, really, not only are there lots of atheists out there, in fact, they have pretty good reasons for their atheism," that can shift the basic terms of the discourse.

Basically, if you take Dawkins to be doing something that he's not really doing, for reasons that aren't really his, he does indeed come out as doing something he shouldn't be doing. But that should be a sign to you that maybe he's just not really doing what you think he's doing.

On “In defense of snark

Snark should not be treated as intrinsically good or bad, but a writerly tool like many others (such as humor, or patient explanation, or parable) can be done better or worse, and done for good or for ill. Far and away one of its chief values is, it seems to me, to do exactly what Freddie felt called upon to do in his earlier post: to engage with someone while at the same time signaling that their discourse failed to cross the minimal threshold of intellectual decency that would merit its received a respectful reply.

A really great version of this sort of thing can be seen with how Michael Berube decided some time ago to treat David Horowitz in a fundamentally non-serious way. At some point, to engage with someone like that seriously only gives unwarranted status to their own basically dishonest writings.

There's an excellent meditation on that particular case here, btw:
http://crookedtimber.org/2007/06/11/why-we-shouldn’t-play-nice-with-david-horowitz-a-response-to-what’s-liberal-about-the-liberal-arts/

Now, if that is something that snark can be good for, one really does have to be careful with it. It should not be used to avoid argument when real argument is called for. But Freddie was right here: McCain's "interpretation" of Schwenkler's post was so spectacularly off the mark, that there is no way to take it as a serious set of claims whose arguments can be addressed. It can only be pointed at with ridicule.

(This is not the only way to use snark, btw; I think that there are friendly-ish uses, of the sort that one sees when folks like Yglesias and McArdle take little pot-shots at each other. But those are only possible in the context of the longstanding, basically serious & respectful conversation that such bloggers have had with each other.)

On “Tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury…

"Now Richard Dawkins has grabbed hold of Bertrand Russell’s tailcoats in definitively proving that God does not in fact exist." What is this in reference to?? That doesn't sound like Dawkins m.o. at all.

And this seems like a downright bizarre thing to say to Dawkins, of all people: "Why not further the cause of biology by writing page-turners about evolutionary theory that don’t even bother touching on these unsolvable questions of faith?" I mean, he's written _The Selfish Gene_, _The Ancestor's Tale_, _Climbing Mount Improbable_, _River Out of Eden_... I mean, the guy has already done exactly what you're telling him he should do. If he has decided that Creationists are, in fact, more than a "nuisance" but are downright dangerous, well, it seems to me that his is indeed a voice worth attending to. I don't think he or any of these other folks really have much of a beef with religion so long as it is a form of personal hobby. But it seems to him -- and to a lot of others -- that it is a vocal faction of the religious who are the primary threat today to the ideal of "Who honestly cares what one person or another believes so long as they are all free to do so?" And they need to be opposed, equally vocally.

On “compromising yourself into the discussion

Part of what we're seeing here is the flip side of the all-or-nothing strategy that the GOP started running since at least Gingrich, and codified under Rove. If you are totally unyielding, then when you get 51%, you get a chance to run the table -- which is basically what they did for a while there. But that same strategy, when you get 49% (or, indeed, somewhat less even than that), means you get bupkis. It's the kind of thinking that can seem soooo attractive when you think that you're within sight of the promised land, as when the Republicans started not just daydreaming about but planning for a "permanent majority". But turns out it's a pretty lousy way to try to operate in a pluralistic democracy.

On “Emerging From the Hedged Roe

"In most places, the pro-choice and pro-life absolutists will no longer find themselves with quite as much power, as the majority in the mushy middle will wind up crafting most state regulations." This sounds just painfully naive to me. Putting aside the rather loaded term "absolutist" here, you're still going to have lots of people in any state with deeply felt commitments about how abortion should be very widely available, or utterly prohibited. And these are the people whose primary and general election votes will be determined largely by politicians' stances with regard to abortion matters. Part of that mushiness of the mushy middle is that they tend not to place abortion issues too front-and-center in their political deliberations, and so their votes will be gotten at through other means.

I think the biggest mistake in this discussion is the idea that the lines drawn in Roe/Casey can somehow be de-arbitrarized. They can't. Any laws here will need _some_ way of drawing lines, and we really have no idea where such lines can reasonably be drawn. A large majority of Americans thinks that drawing a bright line at conception is a bad idea; an even larger marjority of Americans (i.e., practically all of them) thinks that drawing the line at actual birth is a bad idea. And there just aren't any other candidates for bright lines to be found between those two points.

It's a misdiagnosis -- one that the pro-life side has been happy to promulgate for a while -- that the haziness of Roe/Casey is a byproduct of being decided by the courts. It's not. It's a byproduct of the fact that we don't know how to decide when personhood begins. Don't blame the courts for having failed to solve a nigh-well unsolvable philosophical problem. They had to solve a legal problem -- lines had to go in _somewhere_ -- and there's really no reason at all to think that a political/legislative process would have found better lines to draw, because, again, there _aren't_ any better lines to draw.

Another mistake in this discussion is the idea that overturning Roe would simply "throw it back to the states". It wouldn't, as pro-life forces would immediately try to mobilize for various sorts of national laws banning abortions. Every national election would still be a battle about the permissibility of abortion, and under what circumstances.

Long story short: this political issue just plain isn't going away, and the idea that it is a problem of judicial procedure and not irresolvable philosophical differences is deeply mistaken.

On “atheism and monsters

I think that the whole FSM business is a little easier to see in a positive light if you keep in mind that its home context is debates about teaching creationism/"intelligent design" as part of the biology curriculum. The argument is something like: 1. from a scientific standpoint, the FSM is at least as viable a hypothesis, if not more so (no problem of evil here!), than a typical Western monotheistic deity; but 2. it would be patently preposterous to take pastafarianism seriously as a hypothesis for consideration in a science classroom.

More generally, it is probably better to take the FSM as lampooning not so much religious belief itself, but rather the tremendously inflated attitudes & practices that we have in our society & government with regard to religious belief. There's a kind of background presupposition that religious belief, practically _any_ sort of religious belief, is good thing. (This of course has the implication that atheism is a bad thing.) And the FSM serves to highlight, and hopefully ultimately deflate, that presupposition.

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