In this debate, grace is in short supply but irony abounds. The Christian fundamentalist view of Islam bears a striking resemblance to the New York Times' view of Christian fundamentalism — a simplistic emphasis on the worst elements of a complex religious tradition. Both create a caricature, then assert that the Constitution is under assault by an army of straw men. The debates within Islam on the nature and application of sharia law, for example, are at least as complex as the debates among Christian theologians on the nature of social justice. And the political application of Islam differs so greatly — from Saudi Arabia to Mali to Morocco to Bosnia to Tanzania to Detroit — that it defies easy summary.

Many Christian fundamentalists seem oblivious to the similarity of their own legal and cultural peril. In portions of America — say San Francisco or Vermont — conservative Christians are sometimes also viewed as suspicious, illiberal outsiders. Their opinions on gender roles, homosexuality and public morality are viewed as an attack on constitutional values — much as fundamentalists view the threat from Islam. Some secular critics of Islam — Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens come to mind — explicitly argue that the real threat to freedom comes from the oppressive moralism of the entire Abrahamic tradition — Jewish, Christian and Muslim.

Christian fundamentalists who undermine religious liberty in order to target Muslims are playing a game of intolerance roulette. That First Amendment might come in handy someday.  

Ok, I think he's wrong about the New York Times, and I think his appeal to Christian fundamentalists here is a bit disturbing (you're both oppressive moralists!), though perhaps not incorrect.  Many Muslims are cultural if not fiscal and political conservatives.  Alientating them is bad politics.

The more interesting reason comes at the end: "That First Amendment might come in handy someday."  Or put in another way: "you'd be singing a different tune if the shoe were on the other foot."  And here we have, I think, another interesting of the subjunctive (or hypthetical) tu quoque.  Discussed also here.

The argument is clearly of the ad hominem variety.  Not the fallacious kind.  It points out a pragmatic inconsistency in this particular Mosque-opposer's hypothetical argument.  The practical inconsistency is driven, I think, by the analogy with similar circumstances.  So question: is the subjunctive tu quoque burden met by an argument from analogy?  I ask this because many posts ago Scott wondered what the burden was for such arguments (when they're non fallacious).  Perhaps this is one possibility.

The breadth of this lattitude, however, ought to be determined by reality.  This means one ought to use the means available to pin the argument to an actual person or institution whose view is under discussion.  In the days of linkage, this is not very hard: online versions of columns can and often do have links.  When you say something about some person x's view, you can write it as a link ot the place where that person says what you say she says.  Once we have these, then we can discuss the degree to which they are representative of the opposition's case.   

The weird thing about this is that you'd also think in the days of linkage the readers' demands for such precision would increase, not decrease.  I don't have empirical data on this, but I think it's decreased.

Fortunately, an alert reader of the Post noticed just this about Charles Krauthammer's most recent hollow and weak men:

In his Aug. 27 column, Charles Krauthammer offered negative generalizations and accusations about "liberals" — referring to their "promiscuous charges of bigotry" and saying that they give "no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument" and resort "reflexively to the cheapest race baiting," without citing as an example one statement from any so-called liberal person or organization. Surely with liberals running amok and using such baseless and terrible rhetoric, he could have cited a few examples to better make his case.

He stated also that liberals have lost the debate on every issue he cited in the court of public opinion by often lopsided margins, without citing any polling data. My reading of the polls on the issues he listed is that public opinion is much more nuanced than he acknowledged.

By his polemical, over-the-top attack on liberals in general, Mr. Krauthammer practiced what he condemned – giving no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument.

Hurray for this reader.  The reader makes another very important observation at the end.  Columnists–right wing ones especially–work dialectically.  They're allegedly trying to convince the unconvinced.  But then again, maybe they're not and maybe that's the entire problem. 

In this profession, white males, a third of the population, retain a third of the jobs. But black males, 6.5 percent of the U.S. population, have 67 percent of the coveted positions — 10 times their fair share. . . .  Yet no one objects that women are not permitted to compete in the NFL. Nor do many object to the paucity of Asian and Mexicans, or the over-representation of blacks, even as white males dominate the National Hockey League and the PGA.   When it comes to sports — high school, collegiate or professional — Americans are intolerant of lectures about diversity and inclusiveness. They want the best . . .

When it comes to athletic ability, we have very different native capacities, and so it should follow for educational abilities, too. 

Why, then, cannot our elites accept that, be it by nature, nurture, attitude or aptitude, we are not all equal in academic ability?

Buchanan's evidence for this difference in ability between the races is what he sees as the permanent achievement gap in the New York math and language achievement tests.  Whites and Asians generally outperform Hispanics and blacks, even after a good deal of work has been poured into the system to even the numbers.

Since 1965, America has invested trillions in education with a primary goal of equalizing test scores among the races and genders. Measured by U.S. test scores, it has been a waste — an immense transfer of wealth from private citizens to an education industry that has grown bloated while failing us again and again.  Perhaps it is time to abandon the goal of educational equality as utopian — i.e., unattainable — and to focus, as we do in sports and art, on excellence.

Oh, in case you didn't get the point, Buchanan is telling us to re-calibrate our academic expectations for people who are brown:

For an indeterminate future, Mexican kids are not going to match Asian kids in math.

Fallacy checklist:  Equivocation on 'equality'?  Check!  Inequality in ability (even in native abilities) does not mean that one deserves less.   False analogy between sports and athletics?  Check! If you can't throw a curveball, no biggie.  Can't read, well… Vicious use of racial stereotypes? Check!  Seriously, this guy ran for president and almost won the Republican nomination in '96.

We started this blog because we thought that that the newspaper op-ed page was a kind of logical wasteland.  Six years of commentary has shown this to be true.  As for why that is the case, I still have no idea.   

The Professional Right has been put off by how often what they've seen as the ad hominem abusive gets used against them.  Ann Coulter, if you'll remember, had a whole book cataloging all the names conservatives have been called.  Carol Platt Liebau (over at TownHall.com) has weighed in on the issue, and she's against being called a stupid bigot.  And so with the (ahem) Ground Zero Mosque debate:

The recent debate about an imam’s plans to locate a large mosque at Ground Zero has highlighted, as never before, the liberal elite’s utter contempt for the sensibilities of regular Americans. From the President on down, those in favor of the mosque’s construction at Ground Zero have characterized the opponents as ruled only by emotion – especially animus toward all Muslims.

And on the recent California gay marriage case:

Recently, an unelected federal judge struck down a state constitutional amendment passed by a solid majority of Californians – and supported by a majority of Americans generally – that defined marriage as exclusively between one man and one woman. He did so by concluding that there was no rational basis for the measure he had overturned; its only conceivable purpose, according to the judge, was to “enshrine in the California Constitution” an assertion that “opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples.” In other words, Judge Vaughn Walker characterized every single American who has reservations about changing the age-old institution of marriage as irrational bigots.

She sees these liberal types as taking the argumentative situation as one with utter dopes and fools:

Given that the President, Vaughn Walker, and much of the commentariat in favor of the Ground Zero mosque are part of the supposed intellectual and cultural “elite” in this country, the arrogance – and paucity of their moral imagination – is breathtaking. In their formulation, stupidity, ignorance and bigotry are the only conceivable reasons for opposition to anything they deem moral or just.

I am very much sympathetic to Liebau's point — it's best to have as one's defaults that one's argumentative opponents are reasonable, moral humans.  That not only prevents escalation, but it also will likely make it so that both sides will actually work together on finding an acceptable solution to the disagreement.  (I've actually got some research with Robert Talisse  in the works on what we call the "no reasonable alternatives" mindset that all too often takes over when one enters into clear argumentative contexts — more later on that.)  One of the ways to keep from feeding argumentative escalation is to keep the ad hominem temptation down — just because they're wrong about some matter of moral significance needn't mean that they are benighted, stupid, or evil.  It just means they're wrong.  And so now Liebau is going to show us how to do disagreement respectfully? Right? …  Right?

Their intellectual and personal disrespect for those who disagree with them is breathtaking – and it is unleavened by even the slightest dash of humility. . . . The irony, of course, is that in its eagerness to denounce the intolerance and shortsightedness of the masses, the liberal elite reveals itself to be shortsighted and intolerant. . . .  Increasingly, that kind of contempt emanates from those who consider themselves the meritocracy’s crowning glory.  To put it in terms they can understand, it’s hypocritical to claim solidarity with “the common man” while despising everything he holds dear.

Oh well.  Glad to see that someone's good at least good at recognizing abusive language in others.  It's a start.  Of sorts.

I remember back in high school when someone told me that Rush was 'thinking man's music.'  I heard some of the songs, and I wasn't really sure what what my friend was getting at.  In fact, it was "Free Will" that he played for me, and my opinion now is pretty much the same.  Geddy Lee/Neil Peart are just confused about the whole metaphysical issue, and this confusion leads them to some pretty harsh judgments of the downtrodden. 

In a nutshell, "Free Will" is the following set of commitments. #1: If you are committed to fatalism or determinism, you are looking to lay the responsibility for your life's failings on anyone or anything but yourself. (Fate, the gods, and perhaps social conditions).  #2. Laying the responsibility for one's life (and its failings) outside oneself leads one to inaction.  #3. If you are committed to free will, you hold yourself responsible for your life.  #4. If you hold yourself responsible for your life, you are more active in that life.

The first two commitments are the ones that get the most attention, and so the majority of the song is out to cast the poor as people who rationalize their poverty as a consequence of fate, when it actually is because of their own inaction.

There are those who think that they were dealt a losing hand,
The cards were stacked against them; they weren't born in Lotusland.

The implication of 'Lotusland' is that the only benefits that some people appreciate are those of sloth.  Alternately, the case for #3 and #4 is made but briefly:

I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose freewill.

In a way, the Rush strategy is akin to the old pragmatist reconstructions of metaphysical views.  In this case, determinism/fatalism is pragmatically a form of passivity and irresponsibility, and libertarianism is a form of activity and responsibility.  So choosing a metaphysics is equivalent to choosing what kind of person you will be (and  the consequences of being that person). 

The implication is that if you help others (especially because you see them as mere victims of fate), you consequently encourage their further dependence. 

You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill

The conclusions (suppressed of course) are that: C1: One ought to choose the active and responsible life. C2: So one should choose free will as a metaphysics.  C3: Those who live the passive and irresponsible life (and suffer the poverty and ills that come with it) are nevertheless responsible for that life, because "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice".  (And so: the poor have, really, chosen to be that way!)  Finally, because treating the poor as though they are victims of fate promotes their conception of themselves as passive and not responsible for their lives, C4: We ought not even help the poor (as, again, that would be "kindness that can kill").

I will limit myself to three criticisms.  First, the fact of moral luck seems perfectly obvious.  No matter how active a farmer you are, you can't use  your free will to choose that your crops not be eaten by locusts or withered by a drought.  Your choosing free will has no impact on whether you are part of your company's downsizing, that you get brain cancer, or develop a psychosis.  (This song will set you straight on that.) No matter how free will-ist you are, if you're born to a family with little money, no interest in education or social improvement, and a proclivity to violence, it doesn't take much figuring to lay odds on your coming life.  So sometimes it's a reasonable attitude to blame the fates.

Second, there is nothing in the argument that shows that it is true that there is free will, only that believing that you have free will makes you more active.  So far, a Hellenistic fatalist could accept that.  In fact, the old fatalists like Euripides had a term for the thought that their fates were in their own hands — hubris.    Unless it is false that the gods control the world, Rush's suggestions here put his listeners in danger of one of the greatest errors mortals could make, that is, taking themselves to be like gods.  I presume that Rush has taken it for granted that the gods aren't in control, but that makes their whole argument from consequences superfluous.  In fact, it makes the whole song (as an argument) beg the question.

Third, and finally, the two rhetorically most powerful moments in the song key on the fact that one has "chosen" one of the options between freedom and fatalism/determinism.  The first is that if you go with fatalism, "you still have made a choice," and the second is that Geddy/Neil "will choose free will."   But the free will – determinism issue can be recast to  bear on whether the choice in either of these cases is determined.  So the determinist maybe could say: Sure, you choose free will.  That's exactly the kind of person you are — you're a stridently independent, anti-authoritarian, rock and roller.  That's what they all choose.  The fact that you choose free will just goes to show how determined you are.   As a consequence, this choice business, despite the fact that it's the rhetorical peak of the song, is an utter argumentative failure.

Oh, and the guitar solo is a noodly mess, too.

The equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment is an extension of the moral rule of equity; namely, that one must judge all morally similar cases similarly.  The motivating conditions for the 14th Amendment was racial discrimination.  And so, the race of an accuser or the accused is a morally insignificant fact. Consequently, accusations and and cases must be adjudged independently of the race of the people in question.  The basic thought is that we have a right for the rule of equity to govern our legal standing, too.  Laws must equally apply, and the protections from interference by the state must follow these rules.

The thought with equal protection, then, is that (regardless of the fact that the Amendment was occasioned by race) we should follow the rule of respecting individual rights.  Any government must meet a very high standard of scrutiny if it is to interfere with one group's rights, but not another's.  Prohibitions against gay marriage don't meet that standard. Neither did anti-miscegenation laws.  (Same 14th Amendment equal protection clause invoked in both rulings.) California's Proposition 8 is a case of a state interfering with individuals on the basis of a morally irrelevant difference. 

Now, Mark Trapp, at the American Spectator, says that the recent decision to overturn to Proposition 8 is a case of federal  judges "imposing their personal policy preferences, the will of the people notwithstanding."   This is a pretty serious charge, one implies that the decision (and perhaps all judical review) is undemocratic. But if the people willed to take all the rich people's money and cars, that'd be rightly stopped.  If the people voted to prevent all left-handed people from driving, then that'd be rightly stopped, too.  That might be "imposing" a policy preference, but it'd be one guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. 

Trapp seems to think that judicial overturning of a legislative decision is an Federal imposition on a state's sovereignty, and ultimately, individual sovereignty:

Rather than determine for themselves such fundamental issues as abortion and same-sex marriage, many seem resigned or even content to having such momentous public policy decisions made by judges — for whom they do not vote and against whom they have no recourse. 

My question is how can one be in this case a person committed to States' Rights and the organizing value of the Constitution's protection of individual rights on this issue?  If it turns out that California's Proposition 8 runs afoul of the 14th Amendment, then California does not have the right (regardless of the vote count, 52% to 98%) to discriminate. 

You know, one of the few things I find appealing about conservativism is the individualism at its core.  That seems right to me.  But how does States' Right fit in that equation?  Why does a Federal decision over a State's decision matter to someone who cares about individual rights?  If the state is in the wrong and has run afoul of equal protection, isn't it a good thing to have a Federal Government to protect those rights?  I mean, what kind of individualist rationalizes oppression by saying "it's morally irrelevant unequal treatment, but it's the way we do it here." ?  How is the fact that it is here a morally relevant category?

The payoff for informal logic is that I think that some tu quoque arguments can reveal cases of bias and double standards.  Trapp's argument is that protecting the individual liberties of homosexuals with the 14th Amendment contravenes the individual liberties of those in the majority who want to discriminate against homosexuals.  And that's undemocratic and unjust.  You see, Trapp loves liberty so much…

Ludwig Wittgenstein was a philosopher, one that did his most influential later work in the aphoristic style.  Asking questions, putting things in a cute way, and so on.  He made many of his points, really, with lines that could pass for jokes. One of the core commitments of Wittgenstein's system was that to speak a language, you have to share a form of life with others who speak the same language. To illustrate this commitment, he has the enigmatic-oracular line:

If a lion could speak, we could not understand him (PI: p.223)

Again, the thought seems to be that since a lion doesn't share our form of life, its language would be inaccessible to us. 

Now, I'm not so sure about Wittgenstein's point, simply on the reason that if we're able to recognize that the lion is speaking a language, then we must be capable of having at least a decent grasp of what he's talking about.  That is, a necessary condition for attributing to X the capacity to speak a language is that you've some evidence that the sounds X is uttering are semantically contentful and also what those contents are.  (Or at least that you know that they are contentful and you could find out what those contents are.)

But I want to play Wittgenstein's game of making points instead of with straight argument, but with aphoristic style.  And so, here's my proposed counter-example (in the form of a joke):

So a lion walks into a bar…  He sidles up to the juke box and selects a Led Zepppelin song.  He then plays a round of darts.  Then he goes up to the bar, and he says to the bartender: "Wittgenstein wouldn't get this joke."

Should someone committed to Wittgenstein's philosophy of language be troubled by this joke?  Is it funny, regardless?  What are the consequences?

#1: Laws against gay marriage are analogous to anti-miscegenation laws. Therefore, they are unjust.

#2: Laws against gay marriage are analogous to prohibitions against polygamy.  Therefore, they are just.

#3: Laws against gay marriage are analogous to outlawing bestiality (or marrying one's dog).  Therefore, they are just.

The answer to my rhetorical question is that the use of these analogies is innumerable.  Most of the talking heads debating on TV race each other to the punch — whoever gets one of these analogies out first is the one who's framed the debate properly and thereby has the rhetorical upper hand.  Now, I'm all for rhetorical competitions, but c'mon — you'd think that once the analogies are out there, somebody might… you know… address how apt these analogies are.

Enter Steve Chapman, writing for conservative opinion page, Townhall.com.  Importantly, Chapman supports gay marriage, but doesn't want the courts to impose it on the citizenry.  (One of the first questions that comes to my mind when I hear this sort of talk is what's better (again assuming he supports gay marriage): having a just conclusion imposed on a citizenry that does not want it, or an unjust law imposed on a smaller section of that citizenry… that does not want it either!  If you don't see the point of this question, you don't see the point of judicial review.)  Regardless, Chapman runs the gamut of the analogies, and makes it all worse.  Especially when addressing #2:

Gays argue, correctly, that they can't be expected to change their inborn sexual orientation to get married.  But polygamists can assert that monogamy is impossible for them – and, judging from the prevalence of sexual infidelity, for most people.  Nor does the polygamy ban solve any problems.  Men can already have sex with multiple females, produce offspring with them and furnish them with financial support.  Former NFL running back Travis Henry has nine children by nine different women.  Prohibiting polygamy does nothing to prevent such conduct.  It just keeps people who want to do it responsibly from operating within an established legal framework.  That's why I would legalize polygamy as well as same sex marriage.

Seriously, that is the dumbest defense of gay marriage against the analogy with polygamy I have ever seen.  I could not have even made up a more dunderheaded version.  In no way should the argument be that: well, lots of people are going to have multiple partners, and prohibiting polygamy doesn't prevent that, so we should legalize polygamy so they can do it responsibly.  By analogy, Chapman's reasoning would be: gay marriage bans don't reduce homosexual sex and cohabitation.  But that's not what those bans are out to prevent.  Anti-sodomy laws were supposed to do that, and see how they fared constitutionally?  The same fate would befall anti-multiple-baby-daddy laws.

The best way to defend gay marriage is to break the analogies between gay marriage and polygamy and gay sex and bestiality.  The first is a simple moral difference: there is no established frame of injustice associated with gay marriages.  They are, like modern heterosexual marriages, a relationship between equals.  Polygamous marriages have structural inequalities, and the traditional forms of them have them in spades: younger wives are to play the role of child-rearer, clothes-washer, and concubine.  Once they've borne children, they move up the ladder…  Legalizing institutions that have these legacies is akin to legalizing a form of household slavery.  My good friend Thom Brooks has an excellent survey of polygamy and its problems here.

The disanalogy between gay sex and besitality is simply with consent.  Adult humans can give consent, dogs (or what have you) can't.  End of discussion.

So why are people still wrestling with these analogies?  Part of the answer is because columnists like Steve Chapman, despite being on the right side of the issue, can't put together a non-crazy response to them.

In the wake of the leaked Katie Couric tape, with Couric laughing at Sara Palin's kids names, Douglas MacKinnon re-opens the case that Sara Palin was treated unfairly by the media in '08.  He thinks her performances in the Gibson interview (when she couldn't define the Bush Doctrine) and Couric interview (when, she couldn't name a single news magazine) were because of the treachery of the liberals who ran the interviews.  But the real fault lays with the McCain campaign for not protecting her from these ambushes.  That's weird, as it seems that these questions were hardly surprises and could have easily been turned into cases for Palin to showcase her knowledge of politics and foreign affairs, had she done any homework.  Regardless, MacKinnon has the perfect downplayer setup for his case in his opening paragraph:

As the video popped-up this week of far-left, ultra wealthy, and privileged CBS “News” anchor Katie Couric going after then Governor Sarah Palin while mocking the names of her children, it reminded me all over again how much Palin is owed an apology from the “leadership” of the McCain campaign.

That paragraph without the scare quotes still gets the point across — McCain's campaign advisers should have known that liberals would try to take down their witless VP candidate, and they should have stayed with only Sean Hannity and Greta Van Sustren interviewing her.  But with the addition, really, of no more words but a few extra marks (eight little apostrophes), MacKinnon communicates so much more and expresses (and encourages) real hostility to his opponents.

Here, let me show you.  I'll re-write my last paragraph with the addition of scare quotes.

That paragraph without the scare quotes still gets the "point" across — McCain's campaign advisers should have known that liberals would try to take down their witless VP candidate, and they should have stayed with only Sean Hannity and Greta Van Sustren "interviewing" her.  But with the addition, really, of no more words but a few extra marks (eight little apostrophes), MacKinnon "communicates" so much more and expresses (and encourages) real hostility to his opponents.

See?  It's easy to sound much more outraged by and better informed than your opponents with just a few scare quotes.  No wonder a lazy mind like MacKinnon uses them so… liberally.