Posts from 2006

Article posted 9 January 2006 Philosophers’ Carnival #24: an eternal golden braid posted 11pm / revised 8pm 8 March 2007

The Ministry of Enlightenment for this secessionist republic of one is proud to bring you the 24th installment of the Philosophers’ Carnival in the pages of the Rad Geek People’s Daily. The Philosophers’ Carnival has two primary purposes: (1) To provide lesser-known philosophy bloggers with the opportunity to gain some exposure and attract a wider audience, and (2) to showcase the best that a wide range of philosophy blogs have to offer, in one convenient location, for the benefit of philosophically-inclined readers. Some of the past carnivals have had a unifying theme; others have chosen to group related posts together by subject-heading. We here prefer to link each post in a chain by means of thin justifications for the transition, tenuous topical connections, and frequent red herrings. If you’re the type who likes to avoid that sort of thing (you probably hate candy and laughing babies, too), here’s the precis of what’s in the Carnival this time around:

Fun challenge for the reader: try to guess what each post is about, and how I linked each one to the preceding post, before you scroll down and read the abstracts for yourself.

Ready? On, then, with the show:

Philosophers’ Carnival #24

We begin with post that’s been sitting in the queue for a little while: Henry Sidgwick @ Mind (April 1895): The Philosophy of Common Sense, recently brought to us courtesy of the Fair Use Repository. Sidgwick wants the Glasgow Philosophical Society (and, I suppose, us also) to consider how philosophy may be related to common sense, and how we should best understand philosophers such as Thomas Reid, who methodically and emphatically make appeals to the deliverances of common sense in order to do philosophical work. Far from being intellectual laziness in the name of unreflective gut feelings, Sidgwick notes how Reid refers to Hume’s account of the manner in which, after solitary reflection has environed him with the clouds and darkness of doubt, the genial influence of dinner, backgammon, and social talk dispels these doubts and restores his belief in the world without and the self within: and Reid takes his stand with those who are so weak as to imagine that they ought to have the same belief in solitude and in company. His essential demand, therefore, on the philosopher, is not primarily that he should make his beliefs consistent with those of the vulgar, but that he should make them consistent with his own; and the legitimacy of the demand becomes, I think, more apparent, when we regard it as made in the name of Philosophy rather than in the name of Common Sense.
Following on the theme of philosophy and common sense, Jason Stanley @ Leiter Reports (2005-12-03): Scientific vs. Humanist Philosophy offers a metaphilosophical guest post. Much of my blogging, he writes, has been devoted to trying to figure out which distinctions between kinds of philosophical approaches are merely sociological (e.g. reflections of the personal connections and academic credentials of particular philosophers) and which are genuinely substantive. I do think there are rather fundamental distinctions between kinds of philosophers, but (as I’ve been arguing this week) I don’t think they correspond to any kind of division between departments or nexuses that clearly divide two or three kinds of departments (such nexuses exist, but they are considerably more sociological in character). Nevertheless, I think that Brian Leiter has been on to something by his division of naturalistic vs. humanist philosophy. I just don’t think that this division explains anything about the sociology of department relations. I just haven’t been able to put my finger on what it is. He thinks that his finger has been moved somewhat closer to the mark, though, by Michael Strevens’ suggestion that the division is centrally concerned with the relationship that the philosopher sees between philosophy and our ordinary, common-sense self-understanding. Fodor, we are told, is a humanist insofar as his work on the mind is an attempt to vindicate our self-understanding, our human picture of the mind, but Stich, by contrast, uses the tools of philosophy to undermine our conception of ourselves, to alienate us from our own minds. Stanley goes on to consider some more typical points of contrast (such as the use of technical apparatus in logic or the appeal to the history of philosophy) that simply cut across the humanistic-scientific divide, and considers the points at which this division connects with Strawson’s division between descriptive and revisionary metaphysicians.
Reflections on our ordinary self-understanding, and of alienation from or comfort with that, easily bring us to questions about satisfaction, happiness, and our ordinary understanding of how happy or how satisfied we happen to be (or fail to be). Will Wilkinson @ Happiness and Public Policy (2005-12-30): Is the Flat Trend in Self-reported Happiness a Problem? looks at that, and specifically at studies of happiness based on self-reports. Wilkinson challenges a couple of presumptions that seem to be universal in the reports on, and analysis of, this kind of happiness study: (1) presuming that a flat trend in self-reports of happiness reliably indicates a flat trend in how happy people in fact are, and (2) presuming that a flat trend in how happy people in fact are would constitute some sort of deep problem that demands policy solutions. Why prefer we are getting no happier over we have been, and remain, extremely successful at creating happiness? The main reason why, I take it, is that it’s impossible to use the happiness data to drum up demand for one’s favorite unpopular policies without framing it in a way that makes it look like there’s some kind of problem that needs to be fixed. If you say that data show that we’re just as happy as our grandparents in America’s nuclear family, bowling together, Leave it to Beaver golden age, we’ll never socialize medicine! Anyway, the point is: at the very least, you need to at least try to eliminate the most plausible competing interpretations of the data before you move on to try to use happiness data to mount your favorite policy hobby horse. No. At the very least, you need to acknowledge that there are alternative interpretations. Until they do that, people trying to sell policy on the basis of happiness research don’t deserve to be taken very seriously.
Speaking of happiness, one of the many things — perhaps one of the most important things — that we’re inclined to connect — in some sense or another — with happiness — in some sense or another — is friendship — in some sense or another. But all three of those in some sense or anothers are tricky philosophical terrain. Roderick Long @ Austro-Athenian Empire (2006-01-06) recently posted an online copy of his essay from a roundtable on friendship, The Value in Friendship, which sets itself to learning how to ask the questions we need to ask about happiness, friendship, and the connection between them. The purpose of this essay is to ask a question. The question is: What is it that we value in friendship? The purpose of this essay is not to answer the question. That’s a more daunting task than I intend to tackle here. Rather, my purpose is simply to ask the question. You may think I’ve already asked the question; so my essay has achieved its purpose and I should stop right now. After all, didn’t I just say that my question was: what do we value in friendship? But I haven’t really succeeded in asking that question yet, because I haven’t yet clarified what question I am asking. That is, I haven’t yet distinguished the question I want to ask from other questions that are easily confused with it. So we’re not yet at the point of being able to ask my question. We need to wander about in the wilderness a little bit–though hopefully not for forty years–before we can get to the promised land of my question. As we get closer to the question, we see that there’s quite a bit of explaining that we need to do about what you value inside a friendship once you’ve got it, and what you value outside friendship that leads you to become friends in the first place, and the relation of both of these questions to happiness, to pleasure, and to satisfaction. Along the way, we also see how friendship (in both of the separate questions we’ve just posed) exposes thorny problems for two of the perennial candidates for theoretical understandings of how we should value people: strictly partial concern for yourself (represented by egoism) and strictly impartial universality (represented by utilitarianism, among others).
One of the reasons you might want to know better what it is that we value, in becoming friends and in being friends — or at least to know better how to start asking those questions — is to get a better grasp on the limits of friendship, on what it can (or should) survive, and when it can (or should) end. To take a very public example, Jerry Monaco (2005-12-18): The Break Between Sartre and Camus: Gossip, Invective, and the Meaning of History nicely takes us through the causes, the effects, and the historical and cultural context of the bitter end Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre’s friendship (as it proceeded from Francois Jensen’s fusillade-review on Camus’s The Rebel in Sartre’s journal Les Temps Moderns). Aside from the (very real, and very damaging) effects of an overheated intellectual culture of invenctive and literary celebrity in post-war Paris, Monaco also draws out some underlying differences of deep moral and philosophical principles, which were expressed in the feud and which ultimately made friendly engagement not only difficult but intolerable for Sartre and Camus: If one remembers that, at this time (1952), France was actively trying to recover its empire in Indochina and Africa, and that Sartre was actively opposing French colonialism, whereas Camus believed that the anti-colonialists had no moral legitimacy, then one can get a sense of what the feud was really about from Sartre’s point of view. If one remembers that Sartre was trying to existentialize Marxism and therefore not offering very acute criticism of the political acts of the Stalinists, then one can get a sense of what the feud was really about from Camus’ point of view. For both writers the basic principle was how to oppose oppression. For Camus collective resistance to oppression only leads to more oppression. For Sartre Camus’ quietism could only lead to the triumph of the oppressors. Camus believed that Sartre had become an ideologue giving cover to Stalinist domination, while he, Camus, was the advocate of individual human dignity. Sartre believed, that Camus was an apologist for French Imperialism, while he, Sartre was simply choosing to be in history and Camus was choosing in bad faith. Monaco argues that there are important senses in which they were both right and both confused; what he suggests is most important is the way in which the end of their friendship and the limitations of each’s thought came from an inability to work out a common understanding of what questions to ask, how to ask them, and thus what the debate between them was really about in the first place. For us, then The question of who was correct in this argument is not the correct question. The question is how can we come to an historical understanding of the moral issues presented by Camus and how can we come to a moral understanding of the historical issues presented by Sartre. In many ways, in 1952, each represented the missing center in each other’s thought.
These considerations on friendship, and how clash of deep philosophical and moral principle shattered the friendship of Sartre and Camus, brings us to the question of friendship, toleration, and the limits of each. We normally think that tolerance, especially amongst your friends and family, is a virtue–but also a virtue with limits, a virtue that must give way to confrontations with the intolerable. But how do we conceive of the virtue, and where do the limits come from? Aspazia @ Mad Melancholic Feminsta (2005-12-29): On Tolerance: Just Be Polite and Pass the Yams asks what we should make of tolerance: A few years ago I challenged my students to take tolerance seriously as a concept. I was witnessing wacky folks use this concept to push their questionable hypotheses, practices, and policies. In particular, I was concerned with the religious right’s determination to infiltrate school boards in order to bully well-meaning folks to be open-minded and teach Intelligent Design (aka Creationism). She investigates two different (even antagonistic) notions of tolerance — tolerance as respect and tolerance as politeness — and the role that appeals to tolerance played in her students’ linguistic practice: For them tolerance meant that you sort of put up with someone you didn’t like, you know, like your annoying great-Aunt who spouts utter nonsense and lives with 8 cats. My students taught me that most people understand tolerance to mean being polite. Perhaps, it’s a WASPy sort of relic. Don’t ruffle feathers, just smile and pass the yams. Thus, she wonders whether tolerance can be rehabilitated as a virtue, or whether We might be better served by a more robust notion than tolerance.
Of course, one of the original cases for which the question of tolerance arose was religious toleration within civil society. The Cynic Librarian (2005-12-15): Britian as New Islam Laboratory? takes issue with those rabid anti-Moslems who would say that a moderate, modern Islam is a contradiction in terms, but (with the help of an essay by Tahir Abbas) wants to take a hard look at the genuinely hard problems about the relationship between Islam, Muslims and modernity: not only how far modernity can tolerate Islam, but how far Islam can tolerate modernity. [T]he larger question, as I see it, [is the question] of what will happen to Islam as secularism and consumerist values seep slowly into the bones of the young. They will face the question of either rejecting the faith outright, watering the faith down to a shell of its former self, or reacting in fundamentalist rage at the surrounding profane society. Does the solution lie in politics? In civil society? In religion? Or in rethinking all of the above?
And from the debate over religious faith and modernity, where else could you go but a discussion of natural science and the concept of a miracle? Francois Tremblay @ Goosing the Antithesis (2005-11-14): Miracles and materialism reviews the Humean epistemological argument against believing in miracles, and then offers a metaphysical argument that the concept of a miracle (as something that contravenes materialistic natural causation) entails the non-existence of God, by virtue of the (materialistic) form of causal explanation that theists need to identify with natural law in order to make sense of the concept of a miracle: For a miracle to be a miracle, it must be miraculous, that is to say, it must break natural law. And natural law is the result of materialist causation. So the definition of a miracle itself implies that materialism is true ! For it includes both material causation and its break for a specific event. If there is no material causation, then the concept of miracle is meaningless. An embarassing predicament for the theist, if the argument works.
Meanwhile, Kenny Pearce (2005-12-22): Let’s Make Creation Science Not Suck offers a Christian attack on the notion of contra-causal miracles, drawing on arguments from Leibniz. He argues that both naturalist opposition to Christianity, and Christian opposition to natural science, are the result of bad theology and bad science; specifically the mistaken belief in a conflict between the scientific understanding of the world and the reality of miracles — as embodied in the very concept of a miracle as a contravention of natural law. Thus, with Leibniz, Pearce says, I continue to hold that it would essentially amount to God making a mistake if he had to break his own physical laws in order to bring about his will miraculously. Rather, the perfect wisdom and infinite power of God should lead us to conclude that he made a world in which his laws hold always, and that he is able to bring about his will, even in those things we consider miraculous, without breaking physical laws. If I am right about this, then the enterprise of science seen as the attempt to explain everything in the physical world by efficient causes is theologically legitimate. If Creation Science is not to suck, Pearce suggests, it has to give up the idea that it is confronting natural science with a conflicting (miraculous, revealed) explanation of worldly happenings, and instead return to a Leibnizian program of theology of nature, in which theists should make use of final causes in their investigations of nature as a means both to scientific discovery and a better understanding of the ways of God. As an example of how this might work, he points out Leibniz’s example of Snell (whose development of optics, Leibniz claims, depended in part on reasoning from God’s perfection), and also asks us to lee[ am eye on the aesthetic criteria which mathematicians and physicists increasingly make heuristic use of.
But even if the use of God-inspired heuristic principles produces good results, does having once made use of them require us to continue to take them seriously in order to avail ourselves of the results? Along these lines, Clayton @ Think Tonk (2005-12-31): Evolutionary naturalism undefeated? closed out the year by trying to kick the ladder out from under Plantinga’s argument that evolutionary naturalism (E&N) is epistemologically self-defeating; his response is to argue that even if Plantinga’s argument initially works, it gives us no lasting reason to insist on the hypothesis of an Intelligent Designer. Once we’ve reasonably determined that having reliable cognitive capacities (R) supervenes on a particular constitution (C), even if we have to begin with the hypothesis that God created us so that R is true in order to reasonably make that discovery, Clayton argues that, since Plantinga is not claiming that God makes it the case that the conditional probability of R on C is high, [but] that by accepting T, we learn that R on C is high, then if we take him at his word in this claim, the conditional probability of R on C is high enough that we can rationally believe R and can rationally believe that R would be true so long as C is true even if E&N were true, too. But if that’s so, it seems we’ve climbed the ladder and are ready to kick it away. And once we’ve done that, we have no reason to think E&N cannot be accepted. Thus, it may be Plantinga’s justification for theism, and not naturalism, that contains the seeds of its own destruction.
Questions about self-defeating hypotheses, intelligent design and the chances that our world would turn out to be the way it is tangentially inspired Chris @ The Uncredible Hallq (2006-01-02) in A Gambler’s Epistemology, where he considers how far a common response to radical skepticism can be rationally sustained. A common response to radically skeptical thesis (we can’t know if the sun will rise tomorrow, we can’t know whether we’re living in a Matrix-type world or not) is, well, true, but if the sun won’t rise tomorrow, there’s nothing we can do about it. [I’ve] toyed with a broader form of that idea in a previous post on proof. The broad form is reject possibilities that cannot be evaluated on the evidence, because if they’re true, there’s nothing we can do about it. For example, if there’s some evidence that we do in fact live in a Matrix-world, we could consider the evidence, but we must reject the idea of a Matrix-world that is impossible to identify as such. But, Chris worries, discarding a hypothesis just because it defeats our epistemological hopes seems shaky; it seems to rely on a postulate to the effect that a world without undiscoverable secrets are more likely to be the world we live in than a world with undiscoverable secrets. And if ID theorists don’t have a right to the apriori determinations of probabilities that they often lay claim to in order to justify their arguments against naturalism in general or evolution specifically, then it seems that anti-skeptics don’t have a right to apriori determinations of probabilities in order to defeat skepticism, either.
Meanwhile, Richard Chappell @ Philosophy, et cetera (2006-01-06): Transcendental Arguments also considers a form of argument from self-defeat, which he calls Transcendental Arguments, or Practical Arguments. (It’s unclear to me whether what Richard has in mind is identical with what Kant famously had in mind when he talked about transcendental arguments. I expect that it has a lot to do with how you spell out the details.) What I have in mind, he says, are those assumptions that we must make as a precondition to any sort of intellectual progress. Or, more generally, those things that we ought to believe because we’ve got nothing to lose by doing so. If they’re false then we’re screwed anyway, so we might as well just believe them and hope for the best …. it’s not as if the arguments do anything to establish the truth of the belief in question; they merely show that we might as well believe it. As an example, he offers arguments for believing in free will and the laws of thought based on the principle that if we can choose to believe anything, or if we can rationally demonstrate any belief, then there must be free will and the laws of logic must apply; and if we can’t, then we didn’t make the wrong choice or else we couldn’t gain a justified belief by believing otherwise (since without the laws of logic there is no rational justification at all). Wagering against them is in some important respect self-defeating (since at best it is no better justified than the competing view), so go ahead and place your bets on free will and logic. Richard closes by asking whether this sort of reasoning is in fact any good, and where else it might be applied if it is. This may be a good reply to Hallq’s worries as to where the evidential force of the nothing to lose comes from when we dismiss undiscoverable secrets (including radical skepticism) from consideration in looking for good explanations of the world; or it may be subject to exactly the objection to that strategy that Hallq raises. Beware: dialogue may be close at hand!
On the topic of good explanations and undiscoverable secrets, Doctor Logic (2006-01-03): More on explanation offers an attempt to work out just what explanation is, and how a good explanation might or might not relate to explainers that are beyond our ken. The good Doctor suggests that the essential feature of an explanation is a predictive function from causes to effects; he suggests that as long as the predictive function is there, the cause could be either visible or secret, but that purported explanations where the purported cause is such that it leaves no evidential trace, then what we have is not even a bad explanation or an unscientific one, but simply fails to give an explanation of the phenomena at all. If this account of explanation works, it would mean (among other things) that radically skeptical hypotheses fail to even offer an alternative explanation of our experiences for us to consider.
Thinking about explanation and the limits thereof naturally brings us to the explanation of thinking, and whether those limits can encompass explanations of conscious mental states by means of natural facts. Ellis Seagh @ Consciousness and Culture (2005-12-21): Light and darkness: consciousness and reflex takes issue with Chalmers’ claim of an inevitable explanatory gap between natural (neurochemical) properties and first-person phenomenal properties. Why is the performance of these functions [that are in the vicinity of experience] accompanied by experience? Chalmers asks, in the paper that re-introduced the idea of an explanatory gap in all attempts to construct an explanation of consciousness. A little later he puts the same question a bit differently: Why doesn’t all this information-processing go on in the dark, free of any inner feel? It was, presumably, his inability to find an answer to such questions that lay behind his use of the zombie thought-experiment to argue against a materialist, and in favor of a dualist, approach to comprehending consciousness as a phenomenon. My argument here, however, is that he gave up too quickly. Specifically, Seagh argues, there seem to be obvious differences between typical examples of unconscious mental functions and typical examples of conscious mental functions, and these differences seem to have a natural explanation: conscious experience. But if phenomenal properties play an explanatory role in natural processes, then Chalmer’s claim of a systematic explanatory gap seems to be premature.
From one sort of explanatory gap to another: we’ve looked at the purported gap between the natural and the phenomenal; now let’s look at the purported gap between the natural and the normative. It’s common enough to note cases in which an is fails to completely account for an ought; but David Shoemaker @ PEA Soup (2006-01-02): Carnivores on the Run looks at a case in which an ought fails to determine an is, even though it seems that it should — I’m a carnivore. Yes, I said it. But I’m finding there to be less and less of a rational justification for this position. (That’s probably an inaccurate way of putting it, for it may be that there just is no rational justification for it, and never has been, in which case the scalar dimension of this comment refers literally to the degree of scales that have fallen from my eyes, rather than to the degree of justification itself.) Nevertheless, I also find myself utterly unmotivated to change my ways. And I know I’m not alone here (I know for a fact that there’s at least one other PEA brain, for example, who is in the same situation). So what’s going on? David goes on to briefly outline the standard marginal case arguments for ethical vegetarianism, and then asks: if you find the arguments for ethical vegetarianism convincing, but keep on eating meat anyway, what sort of ethical and cognitive position might you be in? Broadly speaking, what do we say about everyday habits that go against the ethical principles we find intellectually convincing?
Marginal cases and meat-eating brings us to a couple of guest posts I recently contributed. There’s Rad Geek @ Philosophy, et cetera (2005-12-05): Freak intelligence, marginal cases, and the argument for ethical vegetarianism and Rad Geek @ Philosophy, et cetera (2005-12-07): The ends in the world as we know it. The first concerns the argument itself: I think that we have some pretty substantial ethical obligations toward non-human animals (hereafter: “animals”; sorry, taxonomic correctness). In fact, I think those obligations are substantial enough that we’re ethically bound, among other things, to stop slaughtering cattle, pigs, chickens, etc. for food. I can’t say, though, that I’m particularly thrilled with the state of the philosophical debate, and in particular I’m not particularly thrilled with a lot of the arguments that try to defend something like my conclusion. Part of the problem is a problem that’s general in a lot of applied ethics: the desire to make arguments that seem to be compatible with a lot of very different philosophical or meta-ethical views tends to end up with arguments that are actually compatible with only a very narrow view of what the world contains. (That’s because, by design, anything that looks too philosophically murky or controversial is pared away in order to make the argument’s appeal broad enough. But what if the world really does have philosophically murky or controversial features?) As a chief example, take the argument over so-called marginal cases and the ethical significance of belonging to a particular species. I go over marginal case arguments more closely and try to set out a response making use of Michael Thompson’s work in The Representation of Life on aristotelian categoricals (which are explored at greater length in the second guest post) and the natural properties of living creatures; the upshot is that carnivores might be able to defend themselves by an appeal to the natural capacity for rationality (of some kind or other) that humans have. (I don’t think the defense is convincing, but showing why requires detail work on the relation between moral standing and rationality, rather than a schematic marginal cases argument.)
The question of marginal cases and natural capacities brings us to Patrick @ Tiberius and Gaius Speaking… (2006-01-06): Capability and Potentiality: The philosophical debates over abortion and the rights of animals are beset by a common question: what characteristic(s), if any, can be listed and described to correctly pick out members of our moral community? In the abortion debates, the worry is that all the arguments that demonstrate the permissibility of abortion also establish the permissibility of infanticide. And since infanticide is pretty roundly condemned, that’s a problem. Similarly, many have argued that no account of what constitutes humanity will include marginal cases like infants or the cognitively disabled but exclude more sophisticated animals. Patrick suggests that a distinction among different kinds of natural capacity — specifically, between potentiality and capability, and then between physical capability and what he calls actual capability, may make some progress toward a solution. If the moral standing of human beings is connected with rationality (as is often suggested in both abortion and animal rights debates), then you’ll get different rules depending on whether you are citing the actual capability for minimal rationality (which would allow for killing fetuses, infants, adults with severe cognitive disabilities, and beasts), bare potentiality for minimal rationality (which would prohibit killing not only fetuses and infants, but perhaps even sperm, eggs, or skin cells under the right conditions), or physical capability for minimal rationality (which might–pending further results from developmental physiology, anyway–allow for killing beasts and aborting early pregnancies, but draw the line somewhere fairly late in pregnancy). Patrick favors physical capability for minimal rationality as drawing the line in something like the intuitive place.

As always, you really should read the whole thing.

The 25th installment will appear at The Uncredible Hallq, sometime in late January. Keep your eyes peeled!

Article posted 8 January 2006 Free Cory Maye posted 10pm / revised 10pm 19 May 2008

Roderick’s recent post (2006-01-06) reminded me: Cory Maye needs our help, and we need to keep eyes on his case. About a month ago, I mentioned the case of Cory Maye in the course of my commentary on the premeditated murder of Tookie Williams by the state of California. Maye was sentenced to die by poisoning on January 23, 2004. Now, as far as the death penalty is concerned, I just don’t care whether Maye is innocent or guilty. Innocent or guilty, the state of Mississippi has no right to kill him when he poses no threat; that’s premeditated murder, with or without the black hood and the Crown on the heads of those responsible. (See GT 2004-12-15: God damn it and GT 2005-12-13: Murder in the first for further discussion in the context of different cases.)

But there are good reasons to think that Maye is innocent, and that the crime of murdering him would be doubly foul. Radley Balko has been talking this up since discovering the case in early December. There are lots of legalistic worries about the conduct of the police and the progress of the trial. It’s important to keep track of those for the purposes of defending Maye’s life, but it’s also important to remember that the pretext on which the narco-cops were storming Maye’s house in the first place — the so-called War on Drugs — is itself a massive, systematic, and senseless paramilitary assault on innocent people, for committing the crime of taking drugs without a permission slip — an act which is at worst foolish, perhaps a vice, but which can at worst hurt only themselves. The cops, in other words, had no damn right to storm Maye’s house, and the state of Mississippi couldn’t give them one even if they had complied with all the official paperwork (which it seems that they didn’t). Whether or not a judge wrote them a warrant that covered Maye’s home, they had no right to be there. Whether or not they knocked and identified themselves, they had no right to break into Maye’s house by force. And when an armed gang that has no right to be there invades your home without your permission and comes after you, you have a right to defend yourself, by force, if necessary. Balko’s right to say:

Maye’s case is an outrage. Prentiss, Mississippi clearly violated Maye’s civil rights the moment its cops needlessly and recklessly stormed his home in the middle of the night. The state of Mississippi is about to add a perverse twist to that violation by executing Maye for daring to defend himself.

— Radley Balko, The Agitator (2005-12-17): Cory Maye

But it’s important to note that that’s true even if the police and D.A.’s version of the story were (as it almost certainly is not) true from beginning to end. The War on Drugs is indeed a war — but it’s a war on people, not substances, and those people have done nothing to deserve being attacked by the paramilitary forces of the State. The warriors are trying to make Cory Maye its latest casualty. They must be stopped.

WikiPedia’s article on Cory Maye summarizes the details of the case. There’s a new website, MayeIsInnocent.com, that provides a clearing-house for information and news about the fight for Maye’s life. If you want to help, here are three things you can do:

Write a couple letters: Read over the information on Maye’s case at The Agitator, at WikiPedia, and at MayeIsInnocent.com. Write a polite, well-considered letter to Governor Haley Barbour (for an example, see Silent Running (2005-12-10): An Open Letter) mentioning the legalistic details that I’ve mostly set aside here, and ask him to grant clemency or a pardon. Be sure to mention what you’re going to do next: take that letter, pare it down to 300 words or fewer, make it a bit less polite, and send it to your local newspapers. Be sure to include URIs for Balko’s coverage and/or MayeIsInnocent.com. The more heat that Barbour gets, and the more that it makes its way into the Op-Ed pages of newspapers across the country, the more pressure there will be to act. And the more that it appears in those Op-Ed pages, the more people will learn about the case.
Post news or commentary on your website about the case. If you haven’t done so already, get on it. If you have, mention anything that’s new since your last post. Why? Because this is important, but it’s in danger of receding into bloggers’ archive sections and out of public sight. Keep the debate alive online and it will have a better chance of reaching more ears both online or offline. If you’ve written letters, you can post copies online for other people to see. If it’s nothing more than a Cory Maye is still in jail and the state of Mississippi still threatens to murder an innocent man, there’s nothing wrong with that, either. Because he is still in jail and the state of Mississippi is still threatening to murder an innocent man; the sword over his head hasn’t moved away just because your attention has. (If you’re the sort to post buttons or banners at the top of your page, Roderick (2006-01-08) and Laura Denyes (2006-01-04) have some suggestions. Don’t forget to link the image to MayeIsInnocent.com or a similar clearing-house.)
Help Cory defend himself in court. If you have the money, you can help by contributing to [Cory Maye’s legal defense fund]. Even small contributions ($10, $20) can be immensely helpful in a case like this. Maye’s case is on appeal, but his current lawyer is a public defendant and needs financial help to be able to continue his investigative and advocacy work on Maye’s case. Contributions can be sent by mail to:

Cory Maye Justice Fund
c/o R.E. Evans
P.O. Box 636
Monticello, MS 39654

See Balko’s post (2005-01-06 for the details.

Battlepanda (2005-12-13) suggests some more ways you can try to raise a ruckus about this. Let’s get on with it: an innocent man’s life is on the line.

Article posted 6 January 2006 Over My Shoulder #5: Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation posted 4pm / revised 8pm 8 March 2007

You know the rules. Here’s the quote. This one is from Susan Sontag’s essay, Against Interpretation (1964):

Interpretation in our own time, however, is even more complex. For the contemporary zeal for the project of interpretation is often prompted not by piety toward the troublesome text (which may conceal an aggression), but by an open aggressiveness, an overt contempt for appearances. The old style of interpretation was insistent, but respectful; it erected another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs behind the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one. The most celebrated and influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud, actually amount to elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of interpretation. All observable phenomena are bracketed, in Freud’s phrase, as manifest content. This manifest content must be probed and pushed aside to find the true meaning–the latent content–beneath. For Marx, social events like revolutions and wars; for Freud, the events of individual lives (like neurotic symptoms and slips of the tongue) as well as texts (like a dream or a work of art)–all are treated as occasions for interpretation. According to Marx and Freud, these events only seem to be intelligible. Actually, they have no meaning without interpretation. To understand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon, in effect to find an equivalent for it.

Thus, interpretation is not (as most people assume) an absolute value, a gesture of the mind situated in some timeless realm of capabilities. Interpretation must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling.

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Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world–in order to set up a shadow world of meanings. It is to turn the world into this world. (This world! As if there were any other.)

The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.

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In most modern instances, interpretation amounts to the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone. Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.

This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes a writer will be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself–albeit with a little shyness, a touch of the good taste of irony–the clear and explicit interpretation of it. Thomas Mann is an example of such an overcooperative author. In the case of more stubborn authors, the critic is only too happy to perform the job.

The work of Kafka, for example, has been subjected to a mass ravishment by no less than three armies of interpreters. Those who read Kafka as a social allegory see case studies of the frustrations and insanity of modern bureaucracy and its ultimate issuance in the totalitarian state. Those who read Kafka as a psychoanalytic allegory see desperate revelations of Kafka’s fear of his father, his castration anxieties, his sense of his own impotence, his thralldom to his dreams. Those who read Kafka as a religious allegory explain that K. in The Castle is trying to gain access to heaven, that Joseph K. in The Trial is being judged by the inexorable and mysterious justice of God…. Another oeuvre that has attracted interpreters like leeches is that of Samuel Beckett. Beckett’s delicate dramas of the withdrawn consciousness–pared down to essentials, cut off, often represented as physically immobilized–are read as statements about modern man’s alienation from meaning or from God, or as an allegory of psychopathology.

Proust, Joyce, Faulkner, Rilke, Lawrence, Gide … one could go on citing author after author; the list is endless of those around whom thick encrustations of interpretation have taken hold. But it should be noted that interpretation is not simply the compliment that mediocrity pays to genius. It is, indeed, the modern way of understanding something, and is applied to works of every quality. Thus, in the notes that Elia Kazan published on his production of A Streetcar Named Desire, it becomes clear that, in order to direct the play, Kazan had to discover that Stanley Kowalski represented the sensual and vengeful barbarism that was engulfing our culture, while Blanche Du Bois was Western civilization, poetry, delicate apparel, dim lighting, refined feelings and all, though a little worse for wear to be sure. Tennessee Williams’ forceful psychological melodrama now became intelligible: it was about something, about the decline of Western civliization. Apparently, were it to go on being a play about a handsome brute named Stanley Kowalski and a faded mangy belle named Blanche Du Bois, it would not be manageable.

— Susan Sontag (1964/1966), Against Interpretation, in Against Interpretation, 6–9.

Article posted 5 January 2006 An Open Question for Constitutionalist Liberals posted 2pm

Here’s a typical, arbitrarily selected attempt by mainstream liberals to explain what’s wrong with the Bush administration’s enthusiastic support undisclosed, unchecked, and unaccountable domestic spying. This comes from Hilzoy at Political Animal (2005-12-18):

What George Bush has done, by signing his Presidential Order, is to produce exactly that accumulation of powers that Madison and the other framers of the Constitution were determined to prevent. He has decided to circumvent the courts’ power to decide whether the government has enough evidence to place someone under surveillance, thereby removing a crucial check on executive power, and arrogating one of the powers of the judiciary to himself.

Moreover, the power he seeks to strip the judiciary of is not a peripheral one; it is essential to the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures. …

In addition, in deciding that he has the right to disregard clear statutes, President Bush is arrogating to himself the power of the legislature as well. The Legislature has the power to make laws; the Executive carries out the laws the Legislature has written. Had George W. Bush wanted to, he could have gone to Congress and asked it to change the laws. Instead, he decided to simply ignore them: to act as though he had the powers that the Constitution reserves to the legislative branch.

He is, essentially, claiming that he has the right not just to execute the laws, but to write them himself, and then to judge their application. …

But if it’s hard to reconcile the administration’s position with the Constitution and the views of the framers, it’s even harder to reconcile it with anything remotely resembling common sense. Because, on this view, the President can do anything he wants — anything at all — during wartime. …

In this country we do not have an absolute monarch. We have a President who is bound by the rule of law, just like the rest of us. When he asserts the right to set the laws and the Constitution aside, and to arrogate all the powers of government in his hands in secret so that he can use it unchecked, we have an obligation to make it clear that he is wrong.

Now, to be clear, I think that the Right’s legal brief on behalf of the Bush administration is both specious and frankly dishonest; they’re wrong, and Hilzoy is right, about the question of positive law. But here’s the open question. There are actually two separate, or separable, objections that Hilzoy is lodging against the use of undisclosed, unchecked, and unaccountable domestic spying on in these passages. Specifically, Hilzoy is objecting both that

Bush has to claim the authority to disregard existing laws and the Constitution in order to justify undisclosed, unchecked, and unaccountable domestic spying (i.e., he’s operating outside of the standing law); and also
engaging in undisclosed, unchecked, and unaccountable domestic spying, in and of itself, involves arrogating all the powers of government into his hands (i.e., he’s diminishing the separation of powers, and thus claiming the right to more power than one person should have).

It should be clear that these two objections are separable. The Constitution didn’t have to be written with provisions for the separation of powers, and the Constitution and the laws can always be changed. If, for example, Bush had gotten Congress to repeal FISA, and, while he was at it, had gotten Congress and the several states to amend the Constitution to repeal or limit the Fourth Amendment, then he wouldn’t be vulnerable to objection 1, but objection 2 would not be affected.

Now, here’s the open question. If Bush had gotten the law and the Constitution changed so as to authorize undisclosed, unchecked, and unaccountable domestic spying, would that have made it O.K.? Would it have even made it substantially less bad?

If it would have, then why would it have? If it wouldn’t have, then why spend so much time and energy stressing the fact that he did tread on the statutory law and the Constitution, if you don’t think that that makes a substantial difference?

Article posted 4 January 2006 Evildoers posted 12pm / revised 3pm 13 February 2008

For the past week, there’s been a lot of hubbub over All Things Beautiful’s Ten Worst Americans challenge. For a lot of reasons, I don’t have a comprehensive list, and I’m not that keen on the whole project (there’s lots of evil and ugliness in the world without going out of your way to seek it out, compile it, and cross-index it; I have no idea what the criteria would be for choosing ten people as more evil than any others; and I think that most of us are already far too fascinated with and fixated on demonology as it is). So I don’t have a Worst Ten list to provide. But I do have a list of additions that I think ought to be there, if lists are to be made. Coming out for the left-liberal corner we have Ampersand at Alas, A Blog (2005-12-27) with a list of seven villains, Patrick at Tiberius and Gaius Speaking… with a list of ten, and Glenn Greenwald and Hypatia at Unclaimed Territory (2005-12-28) with another ten to throw on the barbie. With the exception of Glenn’s silly inclusion of Harry Blackmun, they are pretty much right, as far as it goes, but there are some notable names that I notice tend to get left out. I suggested some additions at Alas and some dishonorable mentions at Tiberius and Gaius, which have been followed up with some debate.

Here’s my contribution of evildoers. I make no attempt to be comprehensive — there are lots of truly rotten people who aren’t on the list, mainly because they are mentioned elsewhere. But these folks are truly rotten, and often overlooked — sometimes because they get shoved out of the way by contemporary contenders that contemporary writers tend to give disproportionate space to, sometimes because the villains are overlooked by pop history anyway, and sometimes simply because political blinders prevent their names from being given serious consideration. The interesting thing is that the blinders rarely constitute defenses of their deeds — although in at least two of the three cases I discuss with Patrick that is what’s happening. It’s just that, for whatever reason, some folks whose crimes are readily admitted, if mentioned, aren’t thought of when you sit down thinking Who should I put down as a terrible evil-doer? I have some ideas about the reasons behind that, but I’d be interested to hear what you think in comments, too.

In any case, here’s my unordered list of overlooked evildoers, cobbled together from my suggestions elsewhere:

Harry S. Truman. He ordered or approved the murders of 500,000 – 1,000,000 Japanese civilians over the course of half a year in 1945.
Curtis LeMay. He carried out the murder of 500,000 – 1,000,000 Japanese civilians over the course of half a year in 1945. He planned and carried out the low-altitude firebombing of Kobe, Tokyo, and 65 other Japanese cities. A nuclear maniac who explicitly denied that there were any innocent bystanders in war, went on to coin the phrase bomb them back into the Stone Age (in reference to the Vietnam War), and went on to become George Wallace’s running mate in 1968, on a platform of white supremacy and more militant anticommunism. During World War II, he repeatedly indicated his belief that the Japanese deserved wholesale slaughter of civilians, and his own public statements and the reminiscences of the soldiers who served under him reveal him as simply reveling in death and destruction.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a pseudo-leftist demagogue who created the military-industrial complex; imprisoned political opponents; seized sweeping censorship powers; pandered to the worst sorts of racism, first in his political alliances with arch-segregationist Dixiecrats and then in whipping up war fever for war against Japan; ordered internment of Japanese-Americans; happily allied with, propagandized for, and consigned 1/2 of Europe to the totalitarian terror of, Joseph Stalin; and became one of the three men who came the closest to becoming a dictator in the United States.
Woodrow Wilson, unreprentant liar and war-monger, KKK fan, arch-segregationist, ardent anti-feminist. His published academic work delighted in white supremacist myth-making; his warmongering drew the United States needlessly into one of the worst and most senseless wars in world history; he built a slave army with the second federal draft in American history, and shredded civil liberties with abandon, happily imprisoning political opponents both during and after the War and presiding over the devastating Palmer Raids. Wilson is one of the three men who came the closest to becoming a dictator in the United States.
George Fitzhugh, who fused the worst elements of statist utopian socialism with a nostalgic view of feudal hierarchy to provide the most militant theoretical defense of white supremacy and race slavery in the prewar South. He authored Slavery Justified, Sociology in the South, and Cannibals All!.
William Tecumseh Sherman, one of the inventors of modern scorched-earth warfare, ravager of the South and murderer of Southern civilians. Sherman followed up his most famous role by pursuing genocidal campaigns against the Plains Indians and Indians in the Southwest from 1869 until his retirement in 1884.
James Eastland, the militant white supremacist Senator from Mississippi, mad dog McCarthyist, and founding father of the White Citizens Councils.
In addition to another Alas commenter’s suggestion of Larry Flynt, I’d also like to add Chuck Traynor, the pimp / pornographer / rapist / batterer / slave-driver who forced Linda Boreman into Deep Throat (among other pornography) and played an instrumental role in founding the mass-market, above-ground film pornography industry in the U.S. through repeated filmed rapes.
Sergio Méndez reminded me that Ronald Reagan certainly needs a mention, yet he seems notoriously absent from many of the lists. I mention him here not because I think he’s often overlooked on lefty lists of rotten people, but rather because I think the primary reasons to include him — his complicity in the formation of the death squads of El Salvador and the plainly genocidal massacre of some 200,000 Indians in Guatemala — is often overlooked in favor of a frankly silly focus on his contributions to the rhetoric of the contemporary Right in America.

The exercise, whatever its demerits, does seem to be a good conversation-starter. What do you think?