A link to Ted Honderich’s essay Terrorism for Humanity [sic] was recently forwarded to members of the Radical Philosophy Association listserv. Several members of the list wrote posts dismissing Honderich’s essay as nauseating–including one post wondering whether it was a hoax in the tradition of the Sokal affair. In response, Edward D’Angelo writes:

Ted Honderich is a respected contemporary British philosopher. He has contributed some important philosophical works in the latter part of the twentieth century. The remark that his paper Terrorism for Humanity, presented at the International Social Philosophy Conference, can be equated with the spoof on postmoderism is discounting the content of the paper. Additionally, saying that one can be nauseous about Honderich’s views is an emotive apppeal. I suggest that we examine the logical content of Honderich’s paper instead of using nonlogical devices to reject his viewpoint.

It seems to me that a flippant dismissal of the paper, or a feeling of nausea, is far from discounting the content of the paper–it is, rather, a very reasonable response to the content of the paper.

Nevertheless, D’Angelo’s suggestion that the logical content of the paper be examined is also a perfectly good one. Therefore, let’s do a bit of analysis, borrowing from the methods advanced by another respected British philosopher, Mr. G.E. Moore:

1. If everything in Ted Honderich’s essay is correct, then the use of terrorist tactics to commit mass murder against civilians is sometimes acceptable.
2. But the use of terrorist tactics to commit mass murder against civilians is never acceptable.
3. Therefore, it is not the case that everything in Ted Honderich’s essay is correct. (M.T. 1, 2)

And thus, something in Ted Honderich’s essay is wrong. Q.E.D.

The form of argument that I have adapted here is, of course, Moore’s famous refutation of external world skepticism; I have, I think, conclusively shown that Honderich’s argument, like the skeptic’s, . . .">deserves nothing more than a certain gesture of the hands.

[This is a somewhat modified version of an e-mail response that I sent over the RPA listserv.]

Notes

1. I leave the identification of which parts of his essay are wrong as a matter for further discussion.

2. It may be objected against my argument, as it was against Moore’s here is one hand, that it merely begs the question. But what meaning is being given to the term begging the question here? Question-begging is a term of logical criticism; what is being claimed is that a fallacy has been committed. One common way to gloss the fallacy involved, which would seem clearly to indict my argument, is that your argument begs the question if it depends on one or more premises that your interlocuter does not accept. If that is a logical crime, then, since Honderich readily denies the crucial premise (2), I (and, mutatis mutandis, Moore) am certainly guilty. But then so is Honderich, whose argument proceeds from the denial of (2); the objection cannot rule my argument out-of-court without doing the same to Honderich’s.

   Indeed, it is much worse than that–a charge of begging the question would, on this account, rule out any argument whatsoever if only some sophist is willing to pick a premise to deny, and stick to it relentlessly until the dialectical game is left in a complete stalemate. (Karl Popper pointed out that a resolute partisan could defend any empirical hypothesis, at the last resort, by simply insisting that any putative counterexample you discover must be a hallucination.) Now I don’t want to deny that someone could use just such a strategem to stalemate any attempt at argument–indeed, sophists sometimes do just that. But the point here is that when they do, it is silly: a sophist who does this is not playing by the rules. The point of dialectical discourse is to hash out reasons for what is said; the point of doing that is to fit what we say as closely as possible to the truth. It’s obvious that it is the sophist who is frustrating this aim, not the person who is actually giving arguments. If begging the question is supposed to pick out a fallacy, then that means it is the question-begger’s fault that the argument gets nowhere. But here it is not your fault, even though your argument depends on premises that the sophist denies.

   A better gloss of what begging the question means—one which nicely solves this difficulty–might be: an argument begs the question when it is less plausible to affirm the premises than it is to deny the conclusion (the word plausible here has to indicate something like objective grounding, rather than the mere willingness to assert a proposition–otherwise this picture merely reformulates the one that we just rejected). Our new gloss is much better fitted to what we think charges of question-begging ought to do: you make an argument in the course of dialectic in order to give reasons for a particular conclusions, and inferring Q from P only counts as giving a reason for Q if there are stronger reasons for affirming P than there are for denying Q. Thus, consider Moore and the skeptic: the skeptic claims to have a deductive argument from philosophical intuitions to the conclusion that one cannot know that Here is one hand. But what’s more obvious? Some murky philosophical intuitions about evil deceivers and the immediate objects of perception? Or the hand in front of your face? It is the skeptic, not Moore, who begs the question: any argument against a Moorean proposition must depend upon something far less plausible than the mundane truisms that one is supposed to be attacking.

   What I maintain, then, is that the massacre of civilians is always and everywhere wrong is a Moorean truth. So, too, is there is no excuse for making shrapnel tear into the guts of little children. So, too, are many others. Honderich thinks he has an argument to show that these are not true, based upon his speculations about the nature of moral philosophy and the hegemonic structuring of ethical sentiments among those benighted souls who disagree with the slaughter of helpless civilians. But Honderich is wrong–he offers no reasons in support of terrorism, because there are no such reasons. All that he can offer is a logical demonstration of the urgent need to reject his premises.

Do not worry, gentle reader: I’ll be wrapping up my discussion of recent events surrounding Roy Moore soon. First, however, I have a minor personal matter to get out of the way: a brief open letter to whoever it is who has been posting a number of comments lately to several unrelated entries on Geekery Today and my Letters to the Editor:

Dear Anti-Semitic Asshole:

I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know why you feel that my letters on the war in Afghanistan, prison overcrowding in Alabama, and other topics are crying out for incisive commentary like the following:

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL or ZIONAL? ** – Are there a true Amnesty International office in Swedish Kingdom? – No!.. We have multi-faced Amnesty Bolaget in SvekJa Kingdom!.. – What does “Bolag” means? – Financial coup runs by the Evangelian Jewish lobbies… Administration serves for the Zionist Imperialism, if you listen to the insider analysis…

[… And so on, and so forth …]

Whatever your reasons, however, this web page is not the place for off-topic, anti-Semitic diatribes. While I want to provide an open forum for commentary, including those with whom I strongly disagree, your long-wided conspiracy theory postings about the International Jewish Conspiracy^TM‘s long arms in Swedish affairs do not have anything at all to do with any past comments or with any of the content on the pages. They are nothing more than hit and run spam that is wasting perfectly good space in my disk quota. They have, therefore, been deleted.

For some time now, I’ve wanted to put together and post some of my thoughts on the issue of anti-Semitism on the Left, and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. What I have to say consists mostly of warnings from more than one direction–I think we need to be very critically aware both of the way that charges of anti-Semitism are wrongly used to abuse and dismiss critics of Israeli government policy, and also of the dangerously uncritical and cavalier atmosphere that the Left generally and the anti-occupation movement particularly have begun to take towards real, mounting problems of anti-Semitism in the movement and in the world at large–problems that need to be seriously faced down and critically confronted if we intend to do any work for justice. However, thanks to you, my dear anti-Semite, I will have to put all that on hold for the time being, because you offer no opportunity for constructive engagement or critical dialogue. You offer only off-topic bullshit that wastes perfectly good disk space on my web host.

Please do not continue to spread this blight on my web-page. You can use the time for many other productive purposes, such as seriously examining the worrisome trend of anti-Semitism in the international Left, or reading more about what horrors sprung up when the dragon’s teeth of anti-Semitism were last sown across the European continent.

Glad tidings! Today, Roy Moore faced an ethics panel for his defiance of a federal court order to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the Alabama Supreme Court building. And the news just in is that they have issued a formal complaint against Moore — suspending him from his duties on the Alabama Supreme Court while the complaint goes before the Court of the Judiciary. If the complaint is upheld in the Court, Moore could be removed from the bench — a victory not only for the rule of law, but for the people of Alabama: someone who is willing to defy a federal court order in order to pull a petty political stunt and push his fundamentalist agenda is a threat to all of us.

Whichever way it turns out, the Associate Justices have at least found the backbone to unanimously overrule Moore and order that the monument be removed from the rotunda [WSFA]. (They can overrule the normal administrative authority of the Chief Justice by a unanimous vote.) So the state of Alabama will most likely not be facing fines for non-compliance, and the damn thing will be moved.

This phase of the battle is winding down, and unless something unexpected happens, you can count on the story to drop out of the national limelight soon. Unfortunately, the whole chain of events has left the national press more or less mystified as to what was going on. Worse, they didn’t realize that they were mystified; they simply substituted their own cariacature of Southern politics for the facts of the matter — redneck jamboree might be an apt description of the picture you get of the events in Montgomery from the coverage in, say, the Washington Post or the New York Times. So let me take a moment to talk about some of these misconceptions.

First, while Moore certainly has a strong base of support amongst white conservatives in Alabama — that’s how he got elected, after all — the crazy-Right Christian fundamentalist demonstrators who have been picked out as mouthpieces for Moore are, by and large, not from Alabama. The events in Montgomery were coordinated on the ground by flacks of the Christian Coalition; supporting organizations flew people in from nearly every state. Although there were certainly Alabamians demonstrating outside of the courthouse, local newsreporters found that they were distinctly a minority amidst the crowds brought in by the Christian Defense Council, Christian Coalition, and others. Meanwhile in television punditry, the only major Alabama faces were John Giles of the Alabama Christian Coalition and Roy Moore himself. Most commentary came from yet more out-of-state professional Christians, such as representatives from Concerned Women for America.

The point of all this is that national media has gotten it wrong about who they are reporting on; it’s not a matter of Alabamians, but rather a matter of the nation-wide network of Religious Right fundamentalists, who happen to be using events in Alabama as their focal point. To say that this reflects one way or another on Alabama is no more accurate than to say the 500 attendees of Southern Girls Convention 2001 in Auburn make Alabama a hotbed of radical feminist activism.

Closely related to this misunderstanding are the incessant comparisons that the national press makes between Roy Moore and George Wallace. Sure, both of them are Southern demagogues who rode a hard Right white quasi-populism to public office and national attention. Sure, both of them acted in defiance of federal courts demanding protection of the civil rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Sure, both of them had a penchant for flamboyant confrontation and ultimately served to embarass the state of Alabama in the national spotlight. But the similarities end there. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of Roy Moore’s position and his motivations to read this as just another crisis over the powers of Southern states vis-a-vis the federal government. Although some of those supporting Roy Moore have given states’ rights as a reason against obeying the federal court, that is not the primary reasons that Roy Moore gives. Here are the reasons that Moore gives:

Separation of church and state never was meant to separate God from our government. It was never meant to separate God from our law.

The question is not whether I will remove the monument. It is not a question of whether I will disobey or obey a court order. The real question is whether or not I will deny the God that created us.

It’s not about states’ rights for Moore; it’s about Jesus. The issue is not his understanding of federalism but rather his understanding of the proper relationship between God and the State. His aims are not decentralist, but rather theocratic. To fail to understand this is to fail to understand the new breed of confrontational conservatism that Moore and his followers represent — a breed of conservatism that the Religious Right has been spreading for the past 30 years or so now.

Complaining about the Yankee press, of course, is not to say that there are not plenty of homegrown misunderstandings of Moore — there are lots, coming from his own defenders. But comments on the Right-wing deviationists will have to wait for a while. In the meantime, let’s just bask in the glow of these happy events: Roy Moore is suspended from his position as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Hosanna, and amen.

At the time I am writing this, Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court has been in contempt of a federal court for half an hour. As of 12:00am he carried his battle against the Establishment Clause to a new level, as he officially stood in defiance of a federal court order to remove his two-ton Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of the Alabama Supreme Court. In the process, he has created a national media circus; he has become yet another embarassment for Alabama in the Yankee press; and his actions may end up costing the State Treasury at the tune of some $5,000 / day if U.S. District Court Judge Myron Thompson makes good on the fine that he says he has been mulling over. But, as someone who’s spent the majority of my life in Alabama, right now I can feel nothing but excitement as Moore makes his lawless stand.

Why is that, you ask? Well, for those who have not followed Moore over the past decade or so of his career, he has made a long career of confrontational theocratic politics, from the original battle over his display of the Ten Commandments and other conduct in his Etowah County Circuit Court, to his ascent to the position of Chief Justice, to his use of the position to issue virulently homophobic tirades masquerading as case law. He is, at best, a dangerous zealot who is willing to use the State’s power of the sword to further his own ends. At worst, he is a demagogue and a charlatan blasphemously using a confrontational form of fundamentalist Christianity to pull media stunts for his own political and financial advancement. My own suspicion is that he is both–that he honestly believes in a version of fundamentalist Christianity that is actually much closer to a form of Gnosticism, a modern-day Right-wing revivalism that legitimates the use of such confrontational tactics and phony martyrdom.

Whatever his real motivations are, his presence on the Supreme Court bench in the state of Alabama has been a terrible liability for the state, and the more blatantly lawless he becomes, the worse it gets. The reason I am so excited is that Moore has gone too far out on thin ice. Tomorrow, the Southern Poverty Law Center will file a motion for him to be found in contempt of court, and if we are lucky, it will land his sorry ass in jail. More to the point, however, the SPLC is also initiating an ethics complaint against Moore, since his defiance of a federal court order is in obvious violation of several sections of the Canon of Judicial Ethics of the Code of Alabama. Moore’s latest exercise in demagoguery has given our state a wonderful opportunity–that is, it has made it quite likely that he will be thrown out of the Supreme Court within a matter of weeks.

Those of you who know me know that I don’t very much like petty vengeance in politics. I don’t usually delight in the misfortunes of people that I disagree with, even politicians that I loathe. It doesn’t fill me with glee to see Roy Moore act in defiance of the Constitution and the federal courts, or to know that it may well result in trouble for him. What makes me happy, and excited, is the prospect of a threat removed–I’m glad that very soon Moore may no longer pose a threat to the judicial system of Alabama.

(N.B.: Watch this space for more on the morrow. I have some more to say about Moore, as well as the local and national media coverage of the fracas. But it can wait; tonight I just want to celebrate the very real possibility of Moore’s impending fall.)

If there is some Evil Genius or cabal of Illuminati out there behind the cycle of repetitive human interest stories that somehow reach every corner of the United States mass media, they’ve at least picked up one of the interesting on-going stories for today.

Because of Father’s Day, a number of outlets have chosen to dust off a standing human interest story that is, at least, a somewhat interesting and quasi-positive feature: the growing number of stay-at-home fathers.

The trend is a good one: although households with stay-at-home fathers are still a tiny minority (about 4% as well as I can estimate) of all households, they are on the rise (the 2000 Census showed an increase of 70% over the 1990 Census). Now, Right-wing polemics to one side, there is absolutely nothing wrong with households in which both parents share childrearing duties and also work outside of the house. But—as feminists have pointed out many, many times–homemaking and childrearing are important work in society, and they are only regarded as not real work—or simply not mentioned at all in discussions of labor and the economy—because they are jobs that are gender-coded female. The result of more women entering workplaces outside of homemaking and childrearing has been a number of significant shake-ups in the cultural and material underpinnings of patriarchy. One can hope that the result of more men entering into homemaking and childrearing will be the same.

Of course, worry-wort that I am, I have plenty of cavils and downsides to worry about. In particular, although an encouragingly large amount of the coverage has been purged of this disease, the old Backlash refrains still come around: CNN, for example, reported on the increasing number of men helping with childcare, etc.—as if spending all day at home cooking, cleaning, taking care of the kids, etc., were some gift that men were chivalrously pitching in to help out the little woman, rather than necessary work that, in this particular household, a man is doing a disproportionate share of in return for financial support from his wife.

Another worry: every single family portrayed in these stories, as far as I can tell (including the San Fransisco Chronicle, Cherry Hill Courier Post, the CNN television report, etc.) has been a family where one or both parents have spent their time in white-collar, upper-middle class professional jobs. Nearly all of them have been white-skinned. Needless to say, all of them have been heterosexual married couples. Just a reminder of how constrained the debate is: all of the debating, measuring, studying, hectoring, and congratulating in the world is completely irrelevant to the many, many, households that simply can’t afford for either parent to stay at home or which are headed by single mothers or which are headed by gay, lesbian, or transgendered couples.

That’s to be expected, I suppose. But if it is important to open up our social norms to include stay-at-home fathers and make them visible, it is certainly just as important—and perhaps much more so—to open them up to include the huge variety of family structures that lie outside the whitebread, heterosexist norms that are standard requirements in the mass media human interest story. And we must continue to work for material improvements (like better access to childcare and healthcare, more flexible work arrangements, etc.) that can make happy, healthy families a reality—no matter what their demographic make-up happens to be.