Today L. and I are flying to the birthplace of the Boston Women’s Health Collective and the home of Benjamin Tucker; as I mentioned here before, the aim is to present an essay I co-authored with Roderick on the prospects for libertarian feminism–and why it should be more feminist than most avowed libertarian feminists seem to think. We will be presenting the essay as participants in the inaugural symposium of the Molinari Society at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division meeting. Roderick has the nitty-gritty on the meeting.

See you in the New Year!

G.E. Moore is one of the most important, and the most overlooked, figures in Analytic philosophy. All too many historical surveys of early Analytic philosophy treat him as attached to Bertrand Russell‘s hip, and as soon as they have got done discussing their joint break with Absolute Idealism and offered a rather Russellian understanding of Moore’s work on Analytic method, they pretty quickly move on to talk about what’s taken to be the heavy-duty stuff: Principia Mathematica, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle. All of this is too damn bad; for as valuable as the parts of Analytic method that Moore and Russell developed more or less in tandem are, there are in the end deep differences between Moore and Russell, in the motivations that led each to adopt Analytic method and the understanding of the aim and right method of philosophy that resulted for each. And I think that it is quite often (although perhaps not always) the distinctively Moorean picture that has something of lasting value to offer us today, even as very few Analytic philosophers can be found anywhere who actually adhere to most or even many of the strictures of the classical Moore-Russell program of conceptual analysis. (The reason why is, briefly, that Russell worked on analytic method from essentially Cartesian motives–his longing for certainty and his efforts to fight what he saw as an uphill battle against thoroughgoing skepticism, whether in his efforts to provide sure foundations for natural science, for everyday perceptual reports, or for mathematics. But Moore’s motives are, strange though it may sound, essentially Kantian; his work begins from the sure truth of the propositions of common sense, and does its best to carefully work out how that truth is possible. Even if the conclusions he ends up at are wrong–and they often are–the picture of philosophy he offers, unlike Russell’s, has much to say to us today–even to those who have set most of programmatic conceptual analysis to one side. It is also, I might add, perhaps the single most important uncredited influence on the development of Wittgenstein’s philosophy.)

In any case: Moore is left out too often when people are telling the story of early Analytic philosophy, and one of the unfortunate side effects is that there is very little of Moore’s philosophy available on the web, even though many of his most influential works have now entered the public domain. But I’m happy to announce a milestone in my own effort to undo a bit of that neglect: the first Chapter of Moore’s Principia Ethica is now completely transcribed and available online (it’s one of the inaugural projects at the Fair Use Repository; more about that, soon). The chapter–entitled The Subject-Matter of Ethics–is probably the best-known of all of Moore’s work on ethics; it contains his (in)famous Open Question Argument and discussion of the Naturalistic Fallacy; it also more-or-less single-handedly inaugurated Analytic meta-ethics. It is now freely available, in beautiful semantic XHTML, for you to read, search, cite, and reprint as you see fit.

In celebration of the occasion, I have also put up a copylefted draft of one of my own essays on Moore, Closing the Question About the Open Question Argument. It’s an attempt, first, to get clear on just how the Open Question Argument works, and, second, to assess its import for meta-ethics in light of important criticisms by Peter Geach. Although I think that Geach’s criticism is vitally important, I argue that important gaps remain in his account, which are best plugged by considerations from Christine Korsgaard’s work on normativity–and, at the end of the plugging, we will have found ourselves coming back closer to Moore’s account than we might have thought. Comments are welcome..

Enjoy!

(I owe the link to Alina Stefanescu’s commentary at Totalitarianism Today 2004/12/05.)

For the past couple decades or so, the mainstream of the gay rights movement has been insisting, as emphatically as they can and in every forum that they can find, that sexuality is determined by a more-or-less fixed sexual orientation and that sexual orientations are something innate–that is, either determined by genetics or by developmental factors during pregnancy. I understand how the tendency came about, in the face of bigoted bluster about the Evil Gay Agenda’s plans to recruit children, the deceptiveness and brutality of ex-gay aversion therapy programs, and more. But it’s an understandabe error, on any number of fronts. The cluster of ideas involved has any number of problems; one of the most fundamental is that it just bypasses the real argument. Let’s suppose, for example, that it turns out to be true that chemical effects on brain development in early pregnancy do have a major effect on adult sexuality, and that diet pills and thyroid medications really do make children much more likely to be gay if mothers take them during the first three months of pregnancy. What should we say about the discovery?

If you haven’t already got good grounds for saying that there’s nothing wrong with being gay or lesbian, then this discovery might make you less inclined to say that gay people can choose to be straight, or that the cultural environment you encounter in childhood can decide whether you’ll be gay or straight. But it won’t keep you from saying idiot things such as this (emphasis added):

These analyses support the conclusion that female offspring are more vulnerable to alterations in sexual orientation via exposure to a variety of prescription drugs, and suggest that this vulnerability is greatest during the first trimester.

Or this:

The finding adds to mounting concern over the use of slimming pills by women trying to lose weight. Prof Dornan said: All drugs can cross the placental barrier and, looking back, we weren’t so aware of what was going on inside the womb. Nowadays, the Royal College’s view is that women should not take drugs unless there is a clinical need.

Look, there are good medical reasons to be concerned about how medications taken during pregnancy affect children’s health at birth or later in life. But making your baby vulnerable to catching gay is not one of them. It’s not a birth defect, dummy. If there’s nothing wrong with being gay, then the increased likelihood of having a gay child ought to have no effect whatever on whether or not you decide to take pills in early pregnancy. (If it were discovered that diet pills made your child more vulnerable to having green eyes, would any researcher make comments like these?)

But it’s vital to notice that, even if the inntatist line on sexuality turns out to be true in every single respect, it does nothing to rule out either subtly (and perhaps unwittingly) homophobic comments like these, or stridently bigoted appeals from explicit homophobes. (Imagine Pat Robertson on television urging Christian mothers that taking thyroid medication during pregnancy makes the baby Jesus cry.) The fact is that there is nothing wrong with being gay–if it’s a choice, it’s not a wicked choice; if it’s a culturally cultivated taste, it’s not a pervse taste; and if it’s innate it’s not a congenital disease. But you can only say that if you have independent reasons for saying that there’s nothing wrong with gay romance or gay sexuality, aside from We can’t help it!

Gay liberation is a demand for the justice and respect that are due to rational human beings, whatever might happen to be under our loved ones’ underwear. Quibbling over whether our sexuality is ultimately up to us or not is an interesting scientific question, but it’s a political diversion. We shouldn’t waste our time on peripheral arguments to get homophobes to think of us as tragic accidents instead of depraved sinners; if we want to win, we need to head straight for the real argument, and we have to go all the way.

(Links thanks to the lovely folks at No Treason.)

From the paleo-deviationists to the neo-deviationists, let’s now consider the recent fuss over the latest incisive moral theorizing from Humane Studies wunderkind Vlad Dracula:

If boiling people alive best served the interests of the Wallachian people, then it would neither be moral or immoral.

Since Vlad has since complained that the infidel are distorting what he said (and playing dirty pool, too!), let’s make sure we have it all in its proper context. Vlad has argued at length in several places that the notion of universal human rights is ultimately nonsensical: rights are, on his account, political artifacts, not natural facts, and so claims of rights only make sense within the context of a constitutional order. He argues, further, that because rights are not natural facts, the citizens of one country have no objectively binding obligations to respect the lives, dignity, or autonomy of people in other countries. He cavils that gratuitous cruelty might not be justified; but that this is merely a matter of a sentimental, not a normative should. One of his infidel challengers had the temerity to point out:

His position on the moral significance of foreigners is also incoherent. If they do not have rights, why should we treat them with decency? Can’t we just smash their heads in with hammers, or nuke them, or boil them alive? What is a sentimental should and where does it come from?

To which Vlad replied:

If boiling people alive best served the interests of the Wallachian people, then it would neither be moral or immoral. It would just be grotesque, or indecent, or harsh. But since it doesn’t have any strategic value, we don’t boil people or nuke them. A sentimental should means that most of us find such behavior unsavory, even barbaric–but it doesn’t match up against any grand moral standard etched into a Libertarian Rosetta Stone. To momentarily digress into pop-philosophical obscurantism, it’s intersubjectively wrong, not objectively wrong (i.e. politically circumscribed).

Prince Dracula is well within his prerogatives to demand some direct approach to addressing this more nuanced perspective. So let’s see what we can do by way of a logical response to the argument.

1. If you can’t make significant rights claims independently of a constitutional order, then there is nothing wrong with boiling innocent foreigners alive to serve Wallachian interests, as long as you don’t mind it.

2. But there is something wrong with boiling innocent foreigners alive to serve Wallachian interests, even if you don’t mind it.

3. Therefore, you can make significant rights claims independently of a constitutional order. (M.T. 1, 2)

Thus, Prince Dracula is wrong, and Bargainer and Logan are right. Q.E.D.

You might claim that I have dealt with the Impaler’s (subtle! nuanced!) position in far too short a space; you might even go so far as to claim that I have begged the question against him. No, I haven’t. In fact, he has begged the question. Just as there are no non-question-begging arguments for terrorism, there are no non-question-begging arguments for the permissibility of boiling innocent foreigners alive in order to further Wallachian interests. If Vlad’s argument is valid, the most that he has shown is that his premises are, in fact, incompatible with points of human decency far more clear than any murky Hobbesian musing about the contextuality of rights claims or an alleged state of nature–and having shown that the Hobbesian argument is incompatible with such a plainly obvious point of human decency is as good a reason as any to deny at least one of the Hobbesian premises. It’s certainly not any reason whatever to dismiss human decency. (For more on the nature of proof and the issue of question-begging, see footnote 2 on my argument against Honderich.)

That it is wrong to boil innocent foreigners alive, and that it is wrong because you are doing something wrong to them is blindingly obvious. In fact, it’s so blindingly obvious that even Dracul admits that it is true; his problem is that he cannot live up to his own moral decency intellectually, and so he invents the weasel category of a sentimental should in order to sidestep the dilemma. (It’s worth pausing to note that this is exactly the same move that is made by some who claim that we have no direct moral obligations towards animals–in order to weasel around the fact that they know perfectly well that it’s wrong to inflict gratuitous cruelty on animals. That Vlad’s argument uses the same tactic towards human beings from outside of your own state is telling. And not in a good way.)

The problem here is trying to make sense of the notion of a sentimental should—why is it that we feel horror at contemplating pitching innocent foreigners into the cauldron and boiling them alive? It seems that the sentiment of horror is either a rational or an irrational reaction to the situation. If it’s an irrational response to the situation, then clearly there are no grounds at all to pay the sentiment any heed in making decisions about what we ought or ought not to do; an irrational feeling as such cannot weigh against a course of action. If it’s a rational response to the situation, on the other hand, what would it be that makes it an apt response to the situation? That the deed being done is in fact a ghastly thing to do to another human being no matter what his or her nationality? But Vlad cannot take this stance and still hold onto his Hobbesian argument.

Is the feeling of gut-wrenching horror justified by something else? If so, what? Rule-utilitarians might claim that it’s justified by the fact that cultivating feelings of horror at such human suffering is conducive to respecting the rights of those who Vlad would allow to have legitimate rights-claims (fellow citizens and parties to relevant treaties). But that would make the feeling of horror at boiling foreigners alive into nothing more than a projective error–useful, perhaps, for people who can’t compartmentalize their feelings for foreigners from their feelings for fellow citizens; but the emotional constitution that would be most reflective of the actual state of affairs would be one that sharply distinguishes between the real obligations not to torture fellow citizens and the free-for-all that is (according to Vlad’s argument) permitted against aliens.

Or you might, instead, claim that, because we’re talking about sentimental attachments here, questions of justification by some state of affairs outside of the sentiment don’t even make sense–it’s just part of being a human being that a horror at torturing other human beings is part of your emotional frame. But this won’t do, either: the sentimental should that Vlad wants to invoke is supposed to be something that enters into our reasons for action; that is, it is something that forms a part of why we do or do not act in a particular way. Emotions are not bludgeons that blindly knock us in one direction or another; they express reasons for or against actions, and as such have to stand or fall as reasons for action, justified or unjustified by how accurately they express the real fact of the matter.

The fact of the matter is that when you throw someone into the cauldron and fill it with boiling water while they scream in agony until they die, you have done something wrong–even if they are not subject to the same state as you are, and even if the state you are subject to is in a state of war with the state that they are subject to. You have done something wrong because you did something wrong to the poor fellow you just boiled alive. If Vlad thinks he has an argument against that, let him bring it out–but he shouldn’t be surprised when it receives nothing more than a certain gesture of the hands.

Update 2004-12-05: Sorry, I got things mixed up a bit. Turns out this was actually about Max Borders writing about the interests of the American people, not about Vlad the Impaler and the Wallachian people. My bad.

Like Roderick, I’ll be spending this weekend at the Alabama Philosophical Society annual shindig–in fact, by the time you read this I will probably already be in Mobile, presenting my essay on Hume’s empiricism and the Missing Shade of Blue–in somewhat shortened version. Here’s an even shorter version: Hume divides all of our perceptions into ideas or impressions, and all of our ideas and impressions can be analyzed as either complex (i.e., made up out of other more basic ideas or impressions) or simple (existing independently of any other perception). He then famously argues that any idea that we can have is ultimately derived from sense experience–because all of our complex ideas must ultimately be composed of simple ideas, and–here’s the big claim–we cannot have any simple ideas except those that are copied from a corresponding simple impression. You can call this the copy princple; it’s both the most important philosophical conclusion in the opening chapters of the Treatise and the first Enquiry, and also the most important methodological principle used in the rest of the book. It’s the key to Hume’s empiricism, and the foundation of nearly all of his most famous arguments concerning causality, the external world, the idea of substance, personal identity, and so on. Yet immediately after giving two arguments for it, he goes on to argue that there is a specific counterexample to it–the so called Missing Shade of Blue. My essay takes up the puzzle and the two questions it raises–the exegetical question of just what the hell Hume thought he was doing in raising, accepting, and then apparently ignoring a counterexample to the principle whose universal truth seems to be the linchpin of his empiricist philosophy; and the philosophical question of what alternatives were on offer, and whether Hume’s solution was the right solution to take. The shorter version of my essay mostly drops the first question, out of considerations of space, in order to concentrate on a novel answer to the second that’s adapted from a distinction made in Mike Watkins’ work on Hume’s arguments on causation. (Actually Watkins’ distinction is subtly different from my adaptation of it to the case; but that’s not too important here.) I argue that Hume actually uses the notions of simplicity and complexity to do two distinct, and separable, kinds of work, and that once the two notions are separated, it becomes clear that there is an attractive solution to the puzzle of the Missing Shade of Blue that avoids abandoning the copy principle by revealing that it is actually ambiguous, and that the only formulation of it worth saving actually poses no difficulty for the Missing Shade thought-experiment. I go on to argue that the richer picture of experience that this offers has big potential ramifications for Hume’s most infamous applications of the copy principle: his skeptical examinations of the idea of objective causal connexion and the idea of external objects.

(Yes, I know that it’s controversial to claim that Hume was a skeptic on these matters. I don’t care. Whether or not Hume ultimately endorsed a skeptical attack on the alleged content of these ideas and the justification of the principles based on them, and if so however he meant for that to be taken in light of his claim that these same arguments are in some sense unnatural, all that I’m concerned with in my essay is the much less controversial claim that Hume found some sort of suspicious examination of these ideas compelling from some standpoint. The name “Hume” is used as a sort of useful shorthand for the case that he makes; if the skeptical Hume does not exist, it will be necessary to invent him.)

Anyway, if you want a more thorough examination than that, you’ll have to just read the essay–but that shouldn’t be too hard, because I’ve placed a draft of it online. Feel free to pass along any questions, comments, applause, brickbats, etc. which may come to mind.

In any case, I’ll be relaxing in Alabama for the rest of the weekend; L. and I are going to be down in Mobile until tomorrow afternoon for the conference, and then staying with my parents for another day before heading up to Detroit again on Monday. Don’t be surprised that posts are held up for a while (ho, ho, ho–as if that’s something new); in the meantime you might check out a couple of fascinating-looking weblogs that Ampersand lately recommended: AVEN Blog, a weblog for the asexual community (which I’m hearing a lot about since the recent article in New Scientist), and Sisters Talk.

I’ll see you in November. Cheers!