Mayor on the mosque
In his bold speech yesterday, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg supports the mosque construction near Ground Zero:
Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question – should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here. This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions, or favor one over another.
The World Trade Centre Site will forever hold a special place in our City, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves – and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans – if we said ‘no’ to a mosque in lower Manhattan.
Political controversies come and go, but our values and our traditions endure – and there is no neighborhood in this city that is off limits to God’s love and mercy, as the religious leaders here with us today can attest.
-Jake
Photo by Flikr user J.O.H.N. Walker under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
No offense
Isaac Chotiner at TNR.com remarks on the controvery over the mosque construction near Ground Zero:
The New York Times front page story today on opposition to the mosque near Ground Zero has the following comments:
–The mosque would be an “unnecessary provocation.” (Sarah Palin)
–”It’s not about religion, and is clearly an aggressive act that is offensive.” (Newt Gingrich)
–Abe Foxman said in an interview on Friday that the organization came to the conclusion that the location was offensive to families of victims of Sept. 11.
Are these not the exact same sentiments that were voiced by people who thought that Salman Rushdie should not have published The Satanic Verses, and that Danish newspapers should not have run cartoons featuring The Prophet Muhammad? The idea that people have some sort of right not to be offended is one the many silly and pernicious things about these arguments
-Jake
Photo by Flickr user pnoeric used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
The ethics of the House ethics committee
Who do they represent?
The most interesting ethical questions surrounding Charlie Rangel don’t concern him, his villas, or his rent controlled apartments. They are about the operation and purpose of the House ethics committee and what ethical perspective members of the House should bring to bear on the controversy.
Rangel, dethroned former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has been charged by the ethics committee with 13 violations, including, among other sins, using his office to solicit donations to school to be named in his honor and failing to pay taxes on and report rental income from a house in the Dominican Republic. Settlement talks have stalled and Democrats are wringing their hands over the prospect of a public ethics trial for a fellow party member. It will not help their chances in the November elections.
A number of ethical perspectives in tension here, and for everyone involved. Here are a few.
First, there is the special obligation one has to himself, his life’s work, and his family. This means wanting to keep one’s job as a Congressman (or to regain one’s job as a chairman), and leads to asking the question: What process and outcome will be best for my election chances?
Second, there is obligation to one’s party, both as a matter of duties to an organization one has freely joined and also as a matter of personal integrity, in the sense of fealty to one’s political and philosophical ideology. This leads to question: What process and outcome will be best for my party’s election chances?
The limits of “moral naturalism”
Why be moral?
David Brooks’ column today discusses “moral naturalists,” who believe our moral faculties are an evolutionary and biological product born out of animals’ need to cooperate. This view is contrasted briefly with those who believe morality comes from God and those who believe we discern moral principles through reason and abstraction. Brooks writes:
One of the participants, Marc Hauser of Harvard, began his career studying primates, and for moral naturalists the story of our morality begins back in the evolutionary past. It begins with the way insects, rats and monkeys learned to cooperate.
By the time humans came around, evolution had forged a pretty firm foundation for a moral sense. Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia argues that this moral sense is like our sense of taste. We have natural receptors that help us pick up sweetness and saltiness. In the same way, we have natural receptors that help us recognize fairness and cruelty. Just as a few universal tastes can grow into many different cuisines, a few moral senses can grow into many different moral cultures.
While moral naturalism has much to offer, especially in regard to understanding and analyzing our moral intuitions, at the bottom, it fails to say anything about why morality is actually important. Okay, so morality is a natural, evolutionary product? So why should I be “moral” when it doesn’t help me? Is it any different than our biological desire for sweet and fatty food, an unthinking impulse that one can choose to indulge, or not?
Moral naturalism, by itself, cannot answer these worries, I believe. A reply about the importance of cooperation and human interests and fulfillment will appeal not to a biological tale, but rather to the religion or abstract reasoning from which moral naturalism is supposedly immune.
-Jake
James Bond out on bond
Espionage and the rule of law
A group of Russians working for a Russian company were charged recently with corporate espionage after they were found hacking into the databases of American companies in New York and Washington, D.C. A few years back a group of Russians working for an American company committed the same crime against Russian businesses in Moscow and St. Petersburg; they were convicted and sent to jail.
Just as preparations for a trial began, the U.S. and Russian governments arranged a deal whereby the group in American would be sent to Russia, and vice versa, and everyone would live freely, away from jail or further prosecution. Sounds fishy, right?
While this scenario never happened, something very close to it did if we take the “corporate” out of “corporate espionage,” replace “hacking” with “going to parties,” and look at the spy swap that occurred after charges were brought against the group of Russia spies.
What are we to make of the fact that regular, official espionage (as opposed to the corporate kind) exists almost entirely apart from domestic and international law? Why is this the case?
History helps
A reply to Han
In his post today, Han disagrees with some big guns–Sandra Day O’Connor and George Nethercutt, Jr.–arguing against the importance of historical knowledge for legal, policy, and political philosophy questions. Alas, I’m with Sandy and Chip on this one.
As to the law, Han writes: “It doesn’t seem to me that in order to understand the purpose and function of the Constitution someone also has to study the Philadelphia Convention of 1787.” Constitutional interpretation is not pure philosophical argumentation, even on interpretative theories that incorporate as much moral philosophy as possible into the process. What does the 5th Amendment’s “due process” language guarantee? Can we figure this out without historical knowledge, by merely analyzing the words de novo?
First off, the phrase itself is historically contingent, a term of art as it were, with roots in the 14th century Magna Carta, and we need to examine this history, as the Founders understood it, to even begin to discern what protections the words deliver to Americans charged with crimes. Secondly, that many judges before us have grappled with the phrase’s meaning is especially relevant for the rule of law, which depends upon the power of precedent, even if to a lesser degree in a Constitutional context. We don’t want judges to redefine the entire Constitution every year.
Will Tariq Ramadan destroy liberalism?
In Foreign Affairs, Mark Lynch criticizes Paul Berman’s new book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, which calls for vigorous opposition to people like Tariq Ramadan, the non-violent, relatively moderate Islamists living in the West and elsewhere, out of a concern for safeguarding liberalism.
Lynch agrees that Ramadan and Co. are not good Western liberals, but he deems Berman’s analysis overly broad, such that it lumps together genuinely distinct Islamist perspectives, and unfairly connects the worst of radical Islamists to moderate Islamists. He concludes that non-violent, moderate Islamists present a legitimate and viable vision for how very religious minorities can live in and contribute to democracy.
There’s a quasi-empirical disagreement at the core of the debate here. Lynch’s argument for engagement with non-violent Islamists assumes that they cannot actually threaten liberalism in the West and elsewhere, while Berman seems to worry that liberalism is acctually in danger.
There’s are more theoretical disagreement, too. One is how much respect a liberal owes a non-liberal or a quasi-liberal (very little on Berman’s view, at least in terms of respecting their beliefs and political participation). And another is how much pragmatic considerations should affect our commitment to liberal values; should we be dogmatically liberal? On the latter, Lynch seems to be of the mind that a little a less liberalism for substantially more stability is a good trade-off. Whether he’s right that Ramadan and Co. really do offer more long-term stability is a separate question.
-Jake
Rote learning and democracy
At TNR, Martha Nussbaum takes Chinese and Singaporean education down a peg. She writes:
It is time to take off the rose-colored glasses. Singapore and China are terrible models of education for any nation that aspires to remain a pluralistic democracy. They have not succeeded on their own business-oriented terms, and they have energetically suppressed imagination and analysis when it comes to the future of the nation and the tough choices that lie before it. If we want to turn to Asia for models, there are better ones to be found: Korea’s humanistic liberal arts tradition, and the vision of Tagore and like-minded Indian educators.
-Jake
I, politician
Richard Cohen on Obama’s inscrutability
In the Washington Post Richard Cohen laments the obscurity of Obama’s politics and person, as if there were no distinction between the two, arguing that Obama’s guardedness derives from his father’s desertion and his separation from his mother when she twice moved to Indonesia. Surely there’s a necessary connection between one’s personal experience and their politics, but this seems to be taking it too far. Cohen writes:
Pragmatism is fine — as long as it is complicated by regret. But that indispensable wince is precisely what Obama doesn’t show. It is not essential that he get angry or cry. It is essential, though, that he show us who he is. As of now, we haven’t a clue.
There’s clearly something here, but it’s unclear what Cohen means by “show us who he is.” At its core, I think Cohen and others simply want to know Obama’s value priorities. But for a politician, that question is an interpretative one based on reading the tea leaves of his decisions, not on the way he does or does not ”wince” at the sight of an oil-covered bird or destroyed local economy.
Cohen wants “a sign that this [oil] catastrophe meant something to Obama, that it was not merely another problem that had crossed his desk;” and then connects this seeming lack of concern to an argument that Obama’s pragmatic foreign policy is similarly amoral. If there’s no coherent theme to Obama’s policies, as Cohen argues, which probably is not true, then the there’s no coherent them to Obama’s policies. It’s doesn’t mean he’s obscure; it means he doesn’t have a clear, systematic, rigid political theory.
That is the nature of pragmatism, especially one that deals with problems as they come. It provides useful ideological flexibility, but seemingly sacrifices any undying commit to any (cherished) principle. To throw some arm-chair psychoanalysis back at Cohen, he is projecting onto Obama, wanting the President to be something he’s not, asking him to have a holistic set of principles, when that’s not, I think, who he really is.
Share your toys…and your astronomy data?
The NYT discusses the debate over NASA scientists keeping their data to themselves.
-Jake
Share us