Category Archives: General discussion

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General discussion

Evangelium vitae

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It's Easter, so let's marvel at the ever so subtle Scholastic reasoning of some Catholic, former Republican public servant and Notre Dame alumnus regarding whether Barack O'Bama should be given an honorary degree by Our Lady of the Lake.  Writing on the op-ed page of the New York Times, he says:

What’s more, it’s important to remember that Notre Dame is a Catholic institution. The school openly flouts the guidelines of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops when it bestows an honorary degree upon a president who supports something anathema to the faith: abortion. Catholic doctrine holds that life begins at conception; as a candidate, Mr. Obama said that determining when life begins “is above my pay grade,” not an answer at all. There is every sign that his administration has a pro-abortion orientation.

The moral conflict could not be clearer. But here’s a solution: Notre Dame should welcome President Obama as its principal commencement speaker but should not give him an honorary degree. You see, policy positions do matter when it comes to honorary degrees, because the degrees honor something.

Now just for fun, and because the Vatican has a neat internet site, here's a Papal Encyclical (Evangelium Vitae 1995):

The Second Vatican Council, in a passage which retains all its relevance today, forcefully condemned a number of crimes and attacks against human life. Thirty years later, taking up the words of the Council and with the same forcefulness I repeat that condemnation in the name of the whole Church, certain that I am interpreting the genuine sentiment of every upright conscience: "Whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia, or wilful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where people are treated as mere instruments of gain rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others like them are infamies indeed. They poison human society, and they do more harm to those who practise them than to those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are a supreme dishonour to the Creator".5

That's a lot of condemned things.  The inclusion of "arbitrary imprisonment" and "torments inflicted on the body or mind" are particulary interesting, given the cheeks puffed out moral posturing a lot (but obviously not all) of conservative Catholics.  Here's the more specific point:

56. This is the context in which to place the problem of the death penalty. On this matter there is a growing tendency, both in the Church and in civil society, to demand that it be applied in a very limited way or even that it be abolished completely. The problem must be viewed in the context of a system of penal justice ever more in line with human dignity and thus, in the end, with God's plan for man and society. The primary purpose of the punishment which society inflicts is "to redress the disorder caused by the offence".46 Public authority must redress the violation of personal and social rights by imposing on the offender an adequate punishment for the crime, as a condition for the offender to regain the exercise of his or her freedom. In this way authority also fulfils the purpose of defending public order and ensuring people's safety, while at the same time offering the offender an incentive and help to change his or her behaviour and be rehabilitated. 47

It is clear that, for these purposes to be achieved, the nature and extent of the punishment must be carefully evaluated and decided upon, and ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. Today however, as a result of steady improvements in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically non-existent.

In any event, the principle set forth in the new Catechism of the Catholic Church remains valid: "If bloodless means are sufficient to defend human lives against an aggressor and to protect public order and the safety of persons, public authority must limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person".48

With all of this (who could have known about the torments at this point?) in 2001 Notre Dame gave an honorary degree to this guy, who personally presided over 155 executions as Governor of Texas.  Not even then, thankfully, was everyone pleased with the degree conferral.

General discussion, Plain Bad Arguments

The Fighting Irish

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I caught the following discussion between two Irish Catholics–Pat Buchanan and Lawrence O'Donnell–about whether Notre Dame should grant an honorary degree to Barack Hussein O'Bama, 44th President of the United States of America.  Buchanan says no, on account of O'Bama's position on the only two issues right wing Catholics seem to care enough about to make any kind of political stand: abortion and stem cell research.  Ok, I'm probably wrong about that.  I think they also care about gay marriage.  You can watch the exchange at this link (I cannot figure out how to embed video–anyone?).

Argument Analysis, George Will, Links, Things that are false

A couple of items

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In case one is interested in how philosophers have reacted to David Brooks' piece (mentioned here yesterday), then they can go over to the Leiter Reports and comment.

In case one is interested in bad arguments in general–as we are–then one can go badarguments.org to practice identifying them.  Have fun.

Finally, if one has been following George F. Will's scientific escapades (discussed by us here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here), one might be interested in the following article published in yesterday's Washington Post.  Here's a critical passage:

The new evidence — including satellite data showing that the average multiyear wintertime sea ice cover in the Arctic in 2005 and 2006 was nine feet thick, a significant decline from the 1980s — contradicts data cited in widely circulated reports by Washington Post columnist George F. Will that sea ice in the Arctic has not significantly declined since 1979.

If only the article were distributed as widely as Will's various factually and logically challenged op-eds.  Here's Tom Toles (of the Washington Post!) on George Will:

 

David Brooks, General discussion, Things that are false

Phronesis

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General philosophical post today.  It doesn't seem David Brooks has read Aristotle.  Had he read Aristotle, he would have not written this:

Socrates talked. The assumption behind his approach to philosophy, and the approaches of millions of people since, is that moral thinking is mostly a matter of reason and deliberation: Think through moral problems. Find a just principle. Apply it.

Discuss. 

UPDATE.  Ok, on the strength of a conversation with one of the commentators here, I will add the following two paragraphs (directly from above) to make the Aristotle point clearer.

One problem with this kind of approach to morality, as Michael Gazzaniga writes in his 2008 book, “Human,” is that “it has been hard to find any correlation between moral reasoning and proactive moral behavior, such as helping other people. In fact, in most studies, none has been found.”

Today, many psychologists, cognitive scientists and even philosophers embrace a different view of morality. In this view, moral thinking is more like aesthetics. As we look around the world, we are constantly evaluating what we see. Seeing and evaluating are not two separate processes. They are linked and basically simultaneous.

Now discuss (again).

General discussion, George Will

Practice with scientists

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While I was away the Washington Post finally got around to posting responses to the two factually and logically challenged George Will pieces on global climate warming change (discussed by us here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here).  One of these, a letter from the World Meteorological Organization, patiently points out that Will has no business interpreting scientific data.  They write:

It is a misinterpretation of the data and of scientific knowledge to point to one year as the warmest on record — as was done in a recent Post column ["Dark Green Doomsayers," George F. Will, op-ed, Feb. 15] — and then to extrapolate that cooler subsequent years invalidate the reality of global warming and its effects.

The second of these, an op-ed by science writer Chris Mooney, while detailing the specific factual failings (legion they were) of Will's two recent columns, made a more general point about the Post's attitude toward facts.  He writes:

Readers and commentators must learn to share some practices with scientists — following up on sources, taking scientific knowledge seriously rather than cherry-picking misleading bits of information, and applying critical thinking to the weighing of evidence. That, in the end, is all that good science really is. It's also what good journalism and commentary alike must strive to be — now more than ever.

We would suggest (for the nth time) that enforcing this recommendation ought to be the job of some kind of grown up, like say an editor.

General discussion, Richard Cohen, Straw Man

Shill the messenger

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Last week, Jon Stewart, television comedian somehow in charge of all responsible TV media criticism, interviewed a TV financial journalist, Jim Cramer, who defended his well documented wrongness by claiming merely to be an entertainer who was "lied to" (rather than a trusted financial guru and television journalist).  It was an embarrassing performance for Cramer, who only made himself looking even worse when he spoke up in his own defense–calling Stewart a comedian, and claiming to have been taken out of context.  That only invited more context.  Leave it to Richard Cohen, Washington Post liberal columnist, to misunderstand the whole proceeding.

He writes,    

The acclaim visited on Stewart for spanking Cramer tells you something. In the first place — and by way of a minor concession — he's got a small point. CNBC has often been a cheerleader for the zeitgeist — up when the market's up, down when it's down. This is true of the business media in general.

But the role that Cramer and other financial journalists played was incidental. There was not much they could do, anyway. They do not have subpoena power. They cannot barge into AIG and demand to see the books, and even if they could, they would not have known what they were looking at. The financial instruments that Wall Street firms were both peddling and buying are the functional equivalent of particle physics. To this day, no one knows their true worth.

It does not take cable TV to make a bubble. CNBC played no role in the Tulip Bubble that peaked, as I recall, in 1637, or in the Great Depression of 1929-41. It is the zeitgeist that does this — the psychological version of inertia: the belief that what's happening will continue to happen.

My informal sense of Stewart's position is that Cramer has represented himself and has been represented as some kind of god-like financial guru (cf. "In Cramer We Trust").  Yet, as Cohen concedes, Cramer didn't know what he was talking about.  That's Stewart's point.  You can see the video here.

I think it's obvious that Stewart is not guilty of the very strong claim Cohen seems to be attributing to him.  So this seems to be a fairly straightforward straw man.

Argument Analysis, Charles Krauthammer

Amoral Scientists or Ethically Serious Presidents

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Krauthammer enters into this week's stem cell fooferaw  today. Krauthammer has consistently generated more serious commentary on embryonic stem cell research than his fellow wapo-cons, Will and Gerson. His view on the issue is measured and reasoned–he engages the moral, scientific, and political questions on this issue with a seriousness so often lacking on op-ed pages. He reproduces his position here:

I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix. Moreover, given the protean power of embryonic manipulation, the temptation it presents to science and the well-recorded human propensity for evil even in the pursuit of good, lines must be drawn. I suggested the bright line prohibiting the deliberate creation of human embryos solely for the instrumental purpose of research — a clear violation of the categorical imperative not to make a human life (even if only a potential human life) a means rather than an end.

This led him to argue that Bush was right to draw a moral line, permitting the 20 or so (Bush claimed 60) existing stem cell lines derived from destroyed embyros to be used in federally funded research, while denying the use of funds for the creation of new lines (either from discarded embryos or research cloning). Krauthammer, however, disagreed with where the line was drawn, holding that research involving new lines from discarded embryos should be able to be federally funded. (Though the Dickey-Wicker amendment is the real force behind this "ban" and neither Bush nor Obama have the authority to revoke the ban against federal funds for the research involving the destruction of embryos–for Bush to suggest that he was the real authority on this question was false).

Obama however is "morally unserious" in his executive order when he turns the decision over to the scientists.

On this, Obama has nothing to say. He leaves it entirely to the scientists. This is more than moral abdication. It is acquiescence to the mystique of "science" and its inherent moral benevolence. How anyone as sophisticated as Obama can believe this within living memory of Mengele and Tuskegee and the fake (and coercive) South Korean stem cell research is hard to fathom.

He repeats the argument that we've examined this week that scientists are a-moral and so can't be trusted to devise reasonable and responsible policies. Once again I'll note my hesitation in regards to this inference. Unless the President is the only person who can make ethical judgments on this matter, or scientists (Sec of H&HS and Director of NIH) are incapable of ethical consideration in their judgments it wouldn't seem to me to follow from this:

Sec. 2.  Research.  The Secretary of Health and Human Services (Secretary), through the Director of NIH, may support and conduct responsible, scientifically worthy human stem cell research, including human embryonic stem cell research, to the extent permitted by law.

 But, setting that aside for the time being, Krauthammer takes offense at the less reported memorandum signed at the same ceremony.

That part of the ceremony, watched from the safe distance of my office, made me uneasy. The other part — the ostentatious issuance of a memorandum on "restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making" — would have made me walk out.

Restoring? The implication, of course, is that while Obama is guided solely by science, Bush was driven by dogma, ideology and politics.

What an outrage. Bush's nationally televised stem cell speech was the most morally serious address on medical ethics ever given by an American president. It was so scrupulous in presenting the best case for both his view and the contrary view that until the last few minutes, the listener had no idea where Bush would come out. 

Obama's address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men. Such as his admonition that we must resist the "false choice between sound science and moral values."

The contrast between Bush's televised speech and Obama's address is striking. Of course, we might remember that Bush was presenting the results of the policy process, and Obama is initiating a process. The real disagreement, however, seems to be on the question whether the President should decide this issue himself (on the basis of his moral beliefs) or delegate the formulation of policy to others (with presumably the authority to intervene or reject their policies).

I'll leave the question of whether Krauthammer has correctly identifed a straw man aside here. But Krauthammer smells a contradiction between resisting the "false choice between sound science and moral values" and Obama's view on cloning for human reproduction.

Yet, exactly 2 minutes and 12 seconds later he went on to declare that he would never open the door to the "use of cloning for human reproduction."

Does he not think that a cloned human would be of extraordinary scientific interest? And yet he banned it.

Is he so obtuse as not to see that he had just made a choice of ethics over science? Yet, unlike Bush, who painstakingly explained the balance of ethical and scientific goods he was trying to achieve, Obama did not even pretend to make the case why some practices are morally permissible and others not.

This is not just intellectual laziness. It is the moral arrogance of a man who continuously dismisses his critics as ideological while he is guided exclusively by pragmatism (in economics, social policy, foreign policy) and science in medical ethics.

Science has everything to say about what is possible. Science has nothing to say about what is permissible. Obama's pretense that he will "restore science to its rightful place" and make science, not ideology, dispositive in moral debates is yet more rhetorical sleight of hand — this time to abdicate decision-making and color his own ideological preferences as authentically "scientific."

This seems a bit forced. To claim that there is a "false choice between sound science and moral values" may be an unfair characterization of Bush's embryonic stem cell policy, but it would seem to claim that sound science and moral values can be made consistent with one another, not that moral values should never limit science. Obama's orders and address argue that the balance between scientific aims and moral values should be differently drawn, not erased entirely. Thus, there is no contradiction as far as I can see here:

I can also promise that we will never undertake this research lightly. We will support it only when it is both scientifically worthy and responsibly conducted. We will develop strict guidelines, which we will rigorously enforce, because we cannot ever tolerate misuse or abuse. And we will ensure that our government never opens the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction. It is dangerous, profoundly wrong, and has no place in our society, or any society.

The last two sentences are troublingly open: Obama opens to the door to a policy that allows the cloning of embryos and their destruction for research and therapeutic purposes. What is meant by "cloning for human reproduction" is not entirely clear, but it seems to only rule out making new human beings (i.e., new "people"?). There are moral arguments that can justify these conclusions. Krauthammer seems to think that there are not and so describes them as the result of a sort of amoral pragmatism devoid of ethical considerations. I'm not sure I've gotten to the hearts of the matter here, but it seems as though we are circling around a dichotomy that depending upon how it is formulated and used may either be a false one, or may be an important piece of an argument about the dangers of allowing ethical decisions to be made by beauraucrats and scientists, and therefore a possible criticism of Obama's open-ended delegation of ethical policy.

But, even if it is the latter it needs to be more rigorously formulated than it is here. Krauthammer has argued the slippery slope before–if we allow scientists to decide to what uses embyros should be put, it is likely that we will end up with policies that are significantly beyond most of our moral intuitions and considered beliefs about the use of human life. As I've said  before, I think this argument can be reasonably made.  For the conclusion to be follow,  does not, however, require the premise that scientists are amoral pragmatists and must be restrained by ethically minded Presidents. The weaker premise that enthusiasm for scientific goals might lead scientists to ignore moral considerations is adequate for the inductive conclusion the argument advances and is plausibly true.Krauthammer's hyperbolic and false dichotomy between science and ethics goes much further than that. The weaker premise something that Obama is advocating be done by the relevant branches and offices of our government, and which on the issue of stem cells at least, Bush decided to do himself. 

 

 

Bad Explanations, Fallacies and Other Problems, False Cause, General discussion, George Will

He Almost Made It

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George Will wouldn't let us down and make it through a column without an awful argument. Last three sentences in a column, that on a cursory reading at least was not that unreasonable. Throughout most of the column, he lambasts Obama for liberal opportunism, cynical budget manipulation, and his lack of qualifications for his job, all of which seems mildly cheap. But then he comes through for us:

One afternoon last week, cable news viewers saw, at the top of their screens, the president launching yet another magnificent intention — the disassembly and rearrangement of the 17 percent of the economy that is health care. The bottom of their screens showed the Dow plunging 281 points. Surely the top of the screen partially explained the bottom. 

I can't say whether there is such a causal relationship between Obama's speech and the Dow Industrial drop, but I worry a bit that Will is confusing MSNBC's immediate feedback stuff with the Dow Industrial Averages.