Oh, politicians and they things they say
Morally wrong or just politically stupid?
Last week The New York Times reported that Connecticut Attorney General and Democratic nominee for Senate, Richard Blumenthal, lied about his Vietnam service. He spoke about when he “served in Vietnam” and the national mood when he “returned”, though the closest he got to war was serving in the Marine Reserve, which it was known would never be deployed. Yesterday, it was revealed that Lucas Baumbach, a Republican candidate for state Senate in Idaho, plagiarized almost word for word from then-Senate candidate Obama’s 2004 DNC speech.
Leaving aside the obvious inquiry of why candidates say silly things, the public philosophical question is whether or not it is wrong. I don’t ask this question from an individual ethics point of view. There is plenty of literature on the morality of lying and plagiarism. I’m more interested in whether it is wrong for candidates, as candidates for political office, to lie and plagiarize. Read more
Free speech and Islam
Pakistan expands internet censorship, including a outright ban on Youtube, after a court deems certain internet content contrary to Islamic law, like a Facebook page encouraging people to draw pictures of Mohammed. This reveals the obvious tension between certain interpretations of Islam and liberalism. The response might be that the court and the country support liberal freedoms, just not when they breach Islamic law. This is essentially a debate about of the fundamental sources and purposes of legitimate government; whether liberal freedoms are core of the whole point of government, whether they’re subordinate to religious values, or whether they’re just somewhat important values included in the bag of political concerns. It doesn’t get any deeper as a matter of political philosophy, which is something I always say about anything concerning Youtube and Facebook, especially in regard to that Youtube video where the dog says “I love you.”
-Jake
Naked guy not guilty!!
Remember naked guy? A jury Wednesday found him not guilty. Let freedom (to be naked) ring.
-Marc
Controlling the uncontrollable
Righting wrongs during wartime
War is difficult to execute, and its costs are inevitable. Good people die, the innocent are hurt or killed, and the destructin – physical and otherwise – persists long after the fighting has stopped.
But that hasn’t prevented us from trying to limit the extent of war’s evil. New facts have surfaced with regard to a disturbing incident in Afghanistan that raise – again – the question of whether such attempts are simply a fool’s errand.
In February, three women were killed in an American Special Operations gaffe, although U.S. soldiers denied it at the time. Now an Afghani investigation has not only confirmed that American forces were responsible for the deaths, but that they attempted to actively hide their involvement. A chilling account in the New York Times reports evidence that Special Operations soldiers dug bullets out of the women in order to disguise the cause of death. Read more
Sam Harris – Can science address morality?
Well-known “new atheist” and neuroscientist Sam Harris took on this controversial question at this year’s TED conference.
Harris suggests that conventional wisdom tells us that science has nothing to say about questions of right and wrong. It cannot give us a foundation for values – it cannot give us goals, it can only help us get to our goals.
But, he says, all moral beliefs reduce to both facts about the brain (since beliefs, culture, experience all take place there) and factual claims about the mind, consciousness, and the world around us, etc. Since we can study these beliefs, claims, and their effects, science and reason can guide us to right and wrong answers about human well-being.
What does science tell us about the possibility of moral realism? Within the philosophical debate, science’s relevance is often neglected.
-Colin
Hate speech and the Constitution
If he contributes nothing else to society, the infamous Fred Phelps has at least forced us to further examine the notion of free speech. At what point does offensive expression become punishable under the law?
Phelps is the leader of the Westboro Baptist Church, which has gained notoriety over the past decade as a result of its practice of protesting military funerals with signs that read “Thank God for IEDs,” “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” and of course “God Hates Fags.” The group believes that our losses in the War on Terror (along with the suffering from Hurricane Katrina and from the economic recession) are part of God’s punishment for our tolerating homosexuality.
The Supreme Court will now hear Snyder v. Phelps, in which the family of a deceased Marine has sued for damages after Phelps et al showed up en force at their son’s funeral. Most Americans would universally and absolutely condemn the church’s actions. But should they be illegal? If the Court sides against Phelps, would that not open the door to further litigation and regulation of “unsavory” speech?
Truly, one of the law’s most difficult conundrums.
-Colin
The (im)possibility of secular judgment
Stanley Fish (whose articles consistently elicit a response from me) has an interesting piece up on two troublesome distinctions in liberal thought: the distinction between religious and secular reasons and the distinction between public and private reasons. As is often the case, the article is really a supportive book review in disguise – this time of law professor Steven Smith’s “The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse.”
“Classical Liberals,” according to Fish, have long argued that when it comes to political debate, religious or value-laden arguments are inadmissible, since they operate on assumptions that are not universally shared or provable. Instead, they argue, we should rely squarely on “secular reason” to do the job of here-and-now policy-making.
But according to Smith / Fish, “secular reason” can’t actually solve ANY of our political problems. At least not without “smuggling in” some of that which it despises – metaphysical assumptions, values, and comprehensive doctrines. Science and reason can’t tell us what to do with data; we must choose how to use the tools of reason, what to aim them at, how to interpret information, and which facts really matter. Reason alone can’t do all of that picking, choosing, and ranking – we need some kind of substantive value system to do that.
Super Bowl Ads Con’t: The Green Police
Following on Colin’s post, the environmental website Grist has a post on the memorable “Green Police” Audi commercial (warning: sweet sweet “green police” music will get stuck in your head). The ad has the internet masses a buzz about whether such a world could ever come about and, more generally, the legitimate extent of government oversight in personal matters. Check out the youtube comment section for a spirited debate. And chime in if you are so inclined.
The Tebow ad, Continued…
So here it is, as it aired:
Not much controversial material there (viewers were told to visit Focus on the Family’s website for the full story, including Christian references and anti-abortion argument), but we’ve all heard plenty about the ad’s intent by this point.
But there’s more to debate here than the ad’s propriety – what about the validity of the argument? The argument being made is a version of the famous “Beethoven example” used by the pro-life community:
“About the terminating of pregnancy, I want your opinion. The father was syphilitic. The mother tuberculous. Of the four children born, the first was blind, the second died, the third was deaf and dumb, the fourth was also tuberculous. What would you have done?”
“I would have terminated the pregnancy.”
“Then you would have murdered Beethoven.”
Convincing, eh? Had Tebow’s mother made what many pro-choice advocates suggest is the “right decision,” we wouldn’t have her successful son Tim. Richard Dawkins rebuts this logic, reminding us that by the same reasoning, we should equally condemn each act of abstinence; after all, every decision NOT to have procreative sex deprives the world of a potential genius. Also, in order for Tim to exist, some 40 million rival sperm lost out in the race to an egg. One of those sperm could have grown up to cure cancer. Is Tim Tebow the man who prevented that cure? These thought experiments are quite interesting, and worth thinking about if we want to get our logic straight on abortion.
(That’s setting aside the factual inaccuracies of the example, as Beethoven was the eldest child, none of his siblings were blind, deaf, or dumb, and his father did not have syphilis).
-Colin
Neutrality on sex education
Ross Douthat makes a typical neutrality-based argument for leaving sex ed decisions up to local communities, not the federal government. Liberals have attacked the fed’s endorsement and funding of abstinence education since the Clinton years, citing studies illustrating its ineffectiveness and often counterproductive results: teenage pregnancies have gone up, not down, with the introduction of abstinence-only. But Douthat contends that comprehensive sex ed does no better, and that this is more about culture than pragmatism anyway:
America’s competing visions of sexuality — permissive and traditional, naturalist and sacralist — have been in conflict since the 1960s. They’ll probably be in conflict for generations yet to come.
But as long as they are, it shouldn’t be Washington’s job to choose between them.
I don’t find this convincing. The fact that there are “competing visions” in a debate doesn’t mean one of them isn’t empirically correct and justifiable as national policy (there are many who don’t accept evolution, western medicine, or global warming, but I think it’s in our national interest to set policy according to the accepted science rather than popular opinion in those matters). But where you stand on this will depend on a number of philosophical assumptions, including your view of democracy, of individual liberty, and of course, on the line between perfectionism and neutrality.
Secondly, I think that Douthat, David Brooks and other conservatives sometimes jump too quickly to “we just can’t prove anything either way in this area”; it’s part of a larger worldview that holds many ethical and political questions beyond the power of reason to answer. Brooks recently used this ephemeral skepticism to call international aid into question and now Douthat employs it to lay sex ed arguments to rest. I think it’s dangerous to give up on analysis this easily – but perhaps that’s my liberal, “everything can be rationally understood” bias 
-Colin
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