Anything else.
Colin, John and I will be at the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA) conference this coming weekend. We're presenting "Tu Quoque Arguments, Subjunctive Inconsistency, and Questions of Relevance." But that doesn't mean that we won't be posting on the NS. We'll be posting short discussions of the sessions we attend. Stay tuned, NS readers!
Oh, and comments on our paper are welcome here.
In the comments on the previous post, NashvilleBrian suggested we take a look at Ron Paul's argument that the SEAL raid to kill OBL was 'absolutely not necessary.' It all sounded very much like the Ron Paul who impressed me back in '08 — insisting that we respect national boundaries for sovereignty, cooperate with other governments, and so on. Of course, the folks at FOX News are going nuts about it. I was curious, and I took a look.
In an interview with Simon Conway (the excerpt posted here), Paul made two arguments for pursuing OBL in Pakistan in a different way.
The first argument was that Pakistan is an ally and a sovereign country. It is a serious breach of international law to show up with a military force inside of another country without their knowledge — even if we are subsidizing their military. Paul makes this point with an analogy:
I think respect for the rule of law and world law and international law. What if he'd been in a hotel in London?
This seems reasonable, if only to show that, assuming we'd balk at sending choppers into the outskirts of London, the trouble is to say what's the relevant difference. Excepting the thought that folks have been expressing concerns that Pakistan hadn't really been pursuing OBL. (I'll come to that at the end of the post.) And of course, if we had the intel and gave it to the Pakistanis and ran backup, that'd done the job, right? Again, I don't know, but it's on those who are reacting so strongly to Paul to explain why that's a bad plan. Not to just go crazy and say he's not fit for the presidency. Another thing to address is Paul's second analogy — that between the pursuit of OBL and KSM. With Kalid Sheikh Mohammed, we relied on the Pakistanis to apprehend him. They got him just fine. Here's Paul:
I think things could have been done somewhat differently. I would suggest the way they got Khalid [Sheikh] Mohammed. We went and cooperated with Pakistan. They arrested him, actually, and turned him over to us, and he's been in prison. Why can't we work with the government?
In that case, Pakistan showed themselves to be a reliable ally and capable terrorist-hunting government. So what gives? Have the facts on the ground changed in a significant way since then? Perhaps they have — KSM was caught on Musharraf's watch, and there is now a very different government. But is that relevant? Again, I don't know, but isn't it the job of those criticizing Paul to explain where the error is? Instead we get stuff like this:
"If there is any doubt that Ron Paul should not even get near the Oval Office, even on a tour of the White House, he has just revealed it," Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips said on his website. "For a Congressman to say the raid to kill the man who is one of the greatest mass murderers of Americans in history was, 'not necessary,' is simply nuts."
Well, at least it is clear that Phillips disagrees with Paul. Not at all clear why. Sigh.
Now, a point about Paul's last analogy. I'm not convinced by it. Pakistan was cooperative with KSM, but that was still pretty close in time to 9/11, and they haven't exactly been cooperative before. And especially with OBL. As noted by Ed Morrisey at Hot Air, the Pakistani Intelligence Service provided the intel for Bill Clinton's strike on OBL, but they also tipped him that it was coming. Oh, and it's not like they've done a bang-up job chasing him down in the meantime. Again, that's not a reason to not respect their sovereignty, but it does weaken the reasons for Paul's confidence that cooperation would have worked.
So a short exercise in speech-act analysis. Discussions threads are often populated with folks who love to go on and on. Often about things only loosely relevant to the issue. The same goes for Q&A periods at philosophy papers — you'll regularly get a question that isn't a question but more someone taking an opportunity to address a roomful of people about whatever they thought last. It's irritating. I've started to call these "I like turtles" contributions, in honor of this classic internet moment. But how to respond? I had taken the route of saying things like: "That's not a question," or "Very nice and equally irrelevant." These are sometimes too confrontational. Well, there's a new internet meme that fills this void. It even comes with an image.
Well, that's just about perfect, isn't it? Sarcasm. Of course. "Cool Story, Bro" is great for these interwebs, but what about amongst the academics? Well:
Alright! All done.
So some explanation. The first thing to note is that the two use either a term of affection or esteem in addressing the other speaker. The effect, however, is not that of expressing affection or esteem, but of patronizing the other speaker. The downplaying is similar to scarequoting — you use the terms and even full locutions of endorsement, but put the marks around them in order to express exactly the opposite sentiment.
"Cool story" and "Astonishing theory," are more strictly sarcastic. Again, the strategy is to use the terms of esteem to express rejection, but one uses some cue to mark that one is flouting the rule of quality (tone of voice, or here, the toothy grin, wide eyes, and fonzie thumb).
The one thing that the first has over the second is that it is so curt. The professor one requires more time and syllables, so it loses the quickfire element, which is part of the appeal of the strategy.
At this link are ten common "biases" or "fallacies" or "faults" or something. I'm not sure what to call them, more on that maybe another time.
So let's have an interactive post. Pick your favorite, tell us about it in the comments by committing it. I'm pretty sure this is going to be awesome.
I was recently at a conference. I attended one paper where the presenter kept using the expression, "I strongly assert…" as a means of premise-introduction. Once, it was used in the context of disagreement. And so: "Some say not-p, but I strongly assert p." I found this locution and its use jarring. It seems exceedingly dogmatic, and moreover, what exactly does 'strongly' mean, anyhow? Confidently, loudly, as though in ALLCAPS?
A question for the NS readership: What is the most charitable reading of this locution?
Here's my shot. In the event of a conference paper, you can't give an argument for every premise or every case where there's a disagreement. Conference papers require tight focus, and so the point is to argue where it is most important, and everything else is left to either bald assertion or apologetic bracketing. That's the art of academic essays. And so 'I strongly assert' stands as a proof-surrogate in these contexts. Now, I think it's a pretty awkward proof surrogate (as one can just as well, and less contentiously, say 'let's assume p, here'), but it at least isn't a major breach of argumentative practice.
That reading is my most charitable, but it still doesn't sit well with me. Any help from those more familiar with this phrase?
American Spectator has a regular blog series called Among the Intellectualioids. Check out the picture of who the intellectualoids are — grubby-looking, beret-wearing, bad-hair eggheads. Wait… is that Satan on the far left?
.png)
In the series' recent installment, Christopher Orlet argues in "The End of Evil" that a new intellectualiod menace is looming: the view that there is no evil. Simon Baron-Cohen holds that the actions we deem evil are most often the consequence of a particular mental disorder characterized by an empathy deficiency. Orlet glosses the view:
The Cambridge don finds the whole idea of evil unhelpful. What's more, it is simplistic and unscientific. It smacks of the Bible and ancient superstitions. And it tells us nothing. Why is one evil? Again, it comes down to the inability to empathize or to identify with others.
To this end, Baron-Cohen has devised six degrees of empathy. His empathy spectrum would award a six to someone like Bill Clinton, who claimed to be able to feel the pain of an entire nation, and a zero to the husband who honestly answers his wife's query about whether her jeans makes her butt look big. At the peak of the bell curve stands your Average Empathy Joe who tears up at Schindler's List, but remains dry-eyed if not slightly nauseous during the Titanic.
Note, by the way, the first couple sentences should be read with a mocking tone: This Cambridge don believes these things. (Modus Tonens alert) All the examples of the variety of scores are Orlet's of course. Especially the one about the jeans. Actually, it seems the whole selection should be read with a mocking tone.
Here's Orlet finally stating the view (and this time without detectable tone):
Baron-Cohen fingers our hormones, genes, and neglectful mothers as causes for empathy deficiency. One example: his research indicates the more testosterone you are exposed to in the womb, the less empathy you will have.
Ah, but once Orlet states the view, he then identifies the real program behind it (and the broader commitment trying to understand why people do horrible things):
Naturally, if the problem is largely genetic and hormonal, as Baron-Cohen argues, it can be eradicated through gene/hormone therapy, thus setting the stage for an edenic future where Israelis and Palestinians group hug and your co-workers do not steal your bologna sandwiches from the lunchroom fridge.
Baron-Cohen's agenda is plain. Close the prisons and admit criminals to hospitals where ObamaCare can work its magic. After all, "no one is responsible for his own genes."
The slippery slope to Obamacare playing the role of prison warden. First, the view is out to explain why people do things that are evil, not just wrong. The objective is to give an account not of how someone could make a moral error, one that any of us could make (for example, stealing bubble gum). No. Rather, the objective is to account for moral transgressions that we cannot think our way into, ones that are not normal, run of the mill moral errors. We aren't just shocked at the acts, we are puzzled by the persons who commit those acts. Calling those persons 'evil' is fine, but it (as Orlet sarcastically notes) does not explain anything. Nor does it make it such that the punishments we give these people can have any effect other than inflict suffering on them. Only if one is a pure retributivist about punishment would one not be interested in understanding why people are or do evil.
Second, nothing introduces a slippery slope argument better than phrases like "Their agenda is plain…" or "You know where that leads…". But Obamacare is about medial coverage for people who haven't got it. Once the state takes a person into custody for committing a crime, the state is responsible for that person's care. If the medical evidence is that the person suffers from a psychological illness, shouldn't it be treated?
Fox Nation–I just sort of ended up there (thanks a lot Media Matters)–notes the following about the Obama Birth Certificate affair:
With a father like this, it is little wonder President Obama did not want to release his full birth certificate.
Though the proof that he was actually born in Hawaii may silence some critics, a new, rather more interesting side of his life has emerged – that his father Barack Obama senior was a serial womaniser and polygamist who government and university officials were trying to force out of the country.
Obama senior married Stanley Ann Dunham, a white student from Kansas, not only when he was said to have already been married to a woman in Kenya, but at a time when interracial marriages were still illegal in many parts of the U.S.
Documents obtained from the U.S. immigration service paint a picture of a man who 'had an eye for the ladies' and, according to his file, had to be warned several times to stay away from girls at the university.
I don't get what that bolded remark has to do with the rest of the story. The rest of the story paints a picture of a serial Newt Gingrich-style womanizer. Does the illegality of interracial marriage in parts of the US at the time add to that fact?
A puzzle for the readers of the NonSequitur.
Colin, John and I will be attending the upcoming Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation (OSSA) conference in the coming weeks. We're presenting a version of the Subjunctive Tu Quoque argument (Colin blazed the trail here).
To the point, I'm slated to comment on a paper with the thesis that there are virtuous circular arguments. I've posed a challenge to the author, with the following argument:
P1: There are no virtuous circular arguments.
C: Therefore, there are no virtuous circular arguments.
The challenge is to explain, if there are virtuous circular arguments, what is wrong with P1 being used to support C. Of course, the author doesn't get to say that P1 begs the question.
Is this out of bounds? Moreover, if the challenge can't be met, what follows?
In yet another argument undermining the wisdom of the New York Times' paywall, Ross Douthat, resident prude, argues that hell must exist. His argument hinges on the reality of human choices. Human choices, without the possibility of eternal damnation, just wouldn't be real. He writes:
Doing away with hell, then, is a natural way for pastors and theologians to make their God seem more humane. The problem is that this move also threatens to make human life less fully human.
Atheists have license to scoff at damnation, but to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score.
In this sense, a doctrine of universal salvation turns out to be as deterministic as the more strident forms of scientific materialism. Instead of making us prisoners of our glands and genes, it makes us prisoners of God himself. We can check out any time we want, but we can never really leave.
The doctrine of hell, by contrast, assumes that our choices are real, and, indeed, that we are the choices that we make. The miser can become his greed, the murderer can lose himself inside his violence, and their freedom to turn and be forgiven is inseparable from their freedom not to do so.
As Anthony Esolen writes, in the introduction to his translation of Dante’s “Inferno,” the idea of hell is crucial to Western humanism. It’s a way of asserting that “things have meaning” — that earthly life is more than just a series of unimportant events, and that “the use of one man’s free will, at one moment, can mean life or death … salvation or damnation.”
There are other ways our choices are real, I'd argue. In the first place, our choices create our character right now. Our choices also affect other people right now. That, I think, is probably punishment enough. Meditating on eternal damnation before deciding whether you want to have carnal knowledge of chunky Reese Witherspoon seems a bit much.
Not to be facile, but Douthat also seems to offer one key reason for not thinking there's a hell:
Is Gandhi in hell? It’s a question that should puncture religious chauvinism and unsettle fundamentalists of every stripe. But there’s a question that should be asked in turn: Is Tony Soprano really in heaven?
Seems like if there were a hell, and if there were a just overseer of it, we'd have an absolutely unequivocal answer to this question. Turns out, however, we don't. So maybe our choices have eternal reality in hell, which just can't determine which ones will send us there.
It's Easter Monday (or Pasquetta), so let's have a contest. In traditional term logic, a syllogism whose conclusion distributes the minor term but whose minor premise does not is guilty of the fallacy of the illicit minor, or the Father O'Malley Fallacy. A student of mine today suggested another name, the Father McPheeley Fallacy.
Anyone have any other suggestions?
And in the tradition of making up gestures descriptive of the fallacies, the one for this one is moon walking.