Things that are false, William Kristol

A last column

A puzzling reflection from William Kristol's last column in the New York Times:

We don’t really know how Barack Obama will govern. What we have so far, mainly, is an Inaugural Address, and it suggests that he may have learned more from Reagan than he has sometimes let on. Obama’s speech was unabashedly pro-American and implicitly conservative.

"Unabashedly pro-American"–that's deep thinking.  "Implicitly conservative," well, that's obviously just wrong.  I wonder who they'll hire to replace him.  Perhaps Ben Stein.

General discussion, Michael Gerson, Straw Man, Things that are false

Childish Things

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Michael Gerson, George W. Bush's former speechwriter, reflects on the meaning of the inauguration.  First, he sees a double standard in comparing the hypothetical (liberal!!) media coverage of John McCain and George W.Bush versus the actual media coverage of Barack Obama.

This inaugural week included a massive achievement in American racial history, an outpouring of civic participation and a gracious executive transition on both sides. But amid the celebration one could detect double standards all around.

If the outcome had been different in November, would John McCain's inaugural coverage have been quite as worshipful as President Obama's — during which the "shiver" up the leg of journalists finally became full-fledged convulsions? Why were the biblical references in Obama's inaugural speech not considered a coded assault on the Constitution, as George W. Bush's were sometimes viewed? And I can only imagine the cascades of hilarity and derision that would have come had Bush messed up the inaugural oath, no matter the cause.

But a sense of victimhood is not attractive from any political perspective. And so, in honor of the "era of responsibility," I put aside such childish things.

The comparison is absolute crap, to put it mildly.  Gerson ought to go back to the coverage of most of Bush's tenure in office for a nauseatingly sycophantic and incurious media, eager to repeat the lamest of his lines, to faun over his heroic landing on an aircraft carrier, his plain-spoken, I-want-to-have-a-beer-with-him (but not that effete, fat, ambitious exaggerator Al Gore) qualities. 

It would have been far less childish of Gerson had he simply not mentioned this things at all.

Now on to Gerson's other childishness.

Any American with a sense of history should feel that sense of awe. Minorities of every background must feel it most deeply. As the father of multiracial children, I feel it deeply enough.

But there was a second, less sympathetic, Obama enthusiasm at work. In a Newsweek essay, Michael Hirsh mentioned Obama's racial achievement. But he went on to say that "there's something else that I'm even happier about — positively giddy. . . . What Obama's election means, above all, is that brains are back." Hirsh declared that the Obama era means the defeat of "yahooism" and "jingoism" and "flag-pin shallowness" and "religious zealotry" and "anti-intellectualism." Obama is a "guy who keeps religion in its proper place — in the pew."

I only wish what Hirsch said were true!  The "flag-pin shallowness" and the other things, however, are in part at least media-driven narratives that won't go away anytime soon.  But aside from that Gerson cannot possibly be serious, the candidate for Vice President on the Republican side openly questioned whether Obama, with his effete university pedigree and tenuous association with a former domestic terrorist (and radical African American preacher), loved America, or was from "real America."  Notice that this wasn't the fringe crazies on Fox News, or Rush Limbaugh, it was the candidate whom Obama defeated in the Presidential election. 

Anyway, Gerson will have forgotten this, because he'll seize upon the remark about religion and accuse Hirsch of arrogance.   

There is much to unpack here. Can it be that Hirsh is "even happier" about the advance of liberal arrogance than he is about the advance of racial justice? And would the civil rights movement have come at all if African American religion had stayed "in the pew"? But suffice it to say that some wish to interpret the Obama victory as a big push in the culture war — as an opportunity to attack their intellectual and cultural "inferiors."

Cheering that the era of Joe the Plumber, John McCain's ignorant and confused campaign prop does not make one guilty of "liberal arrogance."  Nor does cheering the arrival of a President with the pedigree of an intellectual.  Most of all, however, rejoicing at the political marginalization of the narrow-minded Christian zealots does not have anything to do with the civil rights movement.  To be against, in other words, one particularly virulent and ignorant brand of Christian fundamentalism having a role in shaping government policy does not mean one is against religion having any role at all in the private and public lives of citizens.  Those are really different claims–and "in the pew" is obviously a metaphor only the lack of charity or ignorant yahooism would interpret literally (and then radically misapply).  

This line, given the either-orness of the last administration is the kicker:

Most of us have witnessed this attitude, usually in college. The kids who employed contempt instead of argument, who shouted down speakers they didn't agree with, who thought anyone who contradicted them had a lower IQ, who talked of "reason" while exhibiting little of it. They were often not the brightest of bulbs. Most people recover from this childish affliction. Some do not.

You have got to be kidding me.  The People who employ contempt instead of argument and shout down people they don't agree with–or openly question their sanity, patriotism, honesty, sexuality, faith, and so forth–are not obviously the same people who praise the arrival of an intellectual President, who only nights before his inauguration sits down for a discussion with the opposition's leading "intellectuals."

General discussion

How slippery is that slope?

7 Comments

Doesn't look like it will be all that slippery.

Polygamy, on the other hand, has a completely different dynamic, she said. "First of all, it's not a one-on-one partnership. Secondly, the dynamics of polygamous relationships in Bountiful certainly involved serious harms around the age of the women getting married, whether or not they are truly consenting to the marriage, the extent to which parental involvement is a coercive part of those marriages, and the patriarchy of how those marriages operate."

And even if a lawyer could prove that a ban on polygamous marriage is a violation of the Charter, the government is entitled to defend the ban on the basis of greater societal good, Prof. Gilbert said.

Don Hutchinson, the legal counsel for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, said there have been several court decisions around same-sex marriage that could be used to defend polygamy. But he is counting on Parliament's current definition of marriage, which prevents multiple spouses, to douse the polygamy debate, he said.

"I am hopeful that where the courts will land is where they landed in the same-sex reference case in 2004," said Mr. Hutchinson, "that they will say, 'You know what, marriage [is] defined by Parliament and we're going to stick with that.' "

Salt Lake City lawyer Rodney Parker, who has represented members of the polygamous religious community in the United States, said yesterday the legalization of gay marriage in Canada will allow the court to focus directly on the defendants' constitutional rights in a way that U.S. courts could not.

With the Supreme Court of Canada decision legalizing gay marriage, Canada is "further down the path" than the U.S. on marriage issues, he said.

"It is a defence we've argued for in the states," Mr. Parker said in a phone interview from his office. The arguments, however, were ineffective because U.S. prosecutors went after sexual crimes, not polygamy. "The cases we had down here so far involved minors. Oler's case does not involve a minor."

Three possibilities are mentioned for distinguishing the polygamous and same-sex marriages.

1. Marriage is reasonably defined as a pairing.

2. The polygamous relationships involve "serious harms" and can be prevented on that basis.

3. Parliament can make a "social good" argument in the case of polygamy.

The last seems interesting in connection with Jerry Brown's Prop 8 brief, in which he argues that the legal question the S.C. must face is whether there is a compelling reason to abrogate the fundamental right to freedom that includes marriage. I.e. one might grant (if one were arguing in California) that polygamy falls under the protection of the right to freedom, and still make it illegal if you have a compelling reason for doing so.

Lack of Evidence, Peter Beinart

The soft bigotry of low expectations

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With Bush leaving office, people are now scrambling to say something nice.  Now enter Peter Beinart, liberal hawk, whose bad foreign policy judgment has propelled him ever upwards, as it nearly always does in the accountability-free profession of punditry (cf. Tom Friedman).  The wronger you are, the more jobs you get.  Anyway, Beinart today counsels "liberals" (by which he means irony-free stoners with no sense of history, practicality, or self-awareness) to admit that the surge–the 2006 increase in troop levels in Iraq–worked, and that it was "courageous" of Bush to do so.  He writes:

It's no longer a close call: President Bush was right about the surge. According to Michael O'Hanlon and Jason Campbell of the Brookings Institution, the number of Iraqi war dead was 500 in November of 2008, compared with 3,475 in November of 2006. That same month, 69 Americans died in Iraq; in November 2008, 12 did.

Violence in Anbar province is down more than 90 percent over the past two years, the New York Times reports. Returning to Iraq after long absences, respected journalists Anthony Shadid and Dexter Filkins say they barely recognize the place.

Is the surge solely responsible for the turnaround? Of course not. Al-Qaeda alienated the Sunni tribes; Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army decided to stand down; the United States assassinated key insurgent and militia leaders, all of which mattered as much if not more than the increase in U.S. troops. And the decline in violence isn't necessarily permanent. Iraq watchers warn that communal distrust remains high; if someone strikes a match, civil war could again rage out of control.

Moreover, even if the calm endures, that still doesn't justify the Bush administration's initial decision to go to war, which remains one of the great blunders in American foreign policy history. But if Iraq overall represents a massive stain on Bush's record, his decision to increase America's troop presence in late 2006 now looks like his finest hour. Given the mood in Washington and the country as a whole, it would have been far easier to do the opposite. Politically, Bush took the path of most resistance. He endured an avalanche of scorn, and now he has been vindicated. He was not only right; he was courageous.

It's time for Democrats to say so.

He probably could have done better than this if he wanted to praise Bush's courage and wisdom, as he has admitted that perhaps the surge wasn't the cause of Iraq's improvement after all, and, for that matter, he can't really say Iraq has improved.  Well, it has in one sense.  Fewer US troops are dying.  I would say that if you going to make a strong causal claim such as this one, and psychoanalyze people who fail to see the causal connection you do, then you ought to have a more convincing case.

Begging the Question, George Will

Inalienable

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Whatever one's view of gay marriage, one has to admit that many arguments in favor of it rest on some notion of basic rights.  Whether that claim is true is not my concern now.  However, in the interest of full disclosure, I think that it is.  Whatever one's conception of basic rights, in a constitutional democracy such as our own, such rights are guaranteed by the constitution's bill of rights at the federal level, and by state's constitutions at the state level.  The structure our constitutions guarantees that constitutional rights do not depend in the first instance on the whim of the people.  We cannot vote that some minority group be stripped of its constitutional rights.  Constitutional rights are guarantees, aren't they?  

Let's set the stage.  Here's aspiring legal scholar, George Will:

In November, 13,402,566 California voters expressed themselves for or against Proposition 8, which said that their state's Constitution should be amended to define marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman. The voters, confident that they had a right to decide this question by referendum, endorsed Proposition 8 by a margin of 52.3 to 47.7 percent

Well, that's the question isn't it–whether the voters were acting constitutionally (thinking you are, by the way, does not mean you are).  Do the voters get to decide which rights people have according to the constitution by constitutional referendum?  On the one hand, the constitution is malleable by referendum.  And good thing too.  But Will argues that this right has no boundaries.  But this power of referendum certainly cannot be infinite.  I mean, for instance, you can't have explicitly contradictory provisions.  That would mean legal chaos.  You cannot, in other words, answer every constitutional question by referendum.  This way we cannot have an election stripping Mormons of the right to vote, or women of the right to be physicists.  So, in other words, which rights are of this type is the question.  Does civil marriage constitute one such right?  Here's Jerry Brown (in the words of George Will):

Now comes California's attorney general, Jerry Brown — always a fountain of novel arguments — with a 111-page brief asking the state Supreme Court to declare the constitutional amendment unconstitutional. He favors same-sex marriages and says the amendment violates Article 1, Section 1, of California's Constitution, which enumerates "inalienable rights" to, among other things, liberty, happiness and privacy. 

And that's an interesting argument, I think.  If certain rights are inalienable, then it's constitutionally prohibited that they be alienable by referendum, even if that referendum was believed to be constitutional by the voters.  The proper place to answer such questions–that is, about the constitutionality of the questions–is also provided in our constitutions–the courts, whose job it is to interpret the law.  One needs generally to interpret documents whose meaning and provisions are sometimes unclear.  And this seems like an instance of that.  But not to George Will:

Brown's audacious argument is a viscous soup of natural-law and natural-rights philosophizing, utterly untethered from case law. It is designed to effect a constitutional revolution by establishing an unchallengeable judicial hegemony. He argues that:

The not-really-sovereign people cannot use the constitutionally provided amendment process to define the scope of rights enumerated in the Constitution; California's judiciary, although established by the state's Constitution, has the extra-constitutional right to supplement that enumeration by brooding about natural law, natural justice and natural rights, all arising from some authority somewhere outside the Constitution; the judiciary has the unchallengeable right to say what social policies are entailed by or proscribed by the state Constitution's declaration of rights and other rights discovered by judges.

What is natural justice? Learned and honorable people disagree. Which is why such consensus as can be reached is codified in a constitution. But Brown's reasoning would make California's Constitution subordinate to judges' flights of fancy regarding natural justice. Judges could declare unconstitutional any act of Constitution-revising by the people.

That's the constitutional role of the judiciary (as established by case law).  Their having this role does not mean the people of California are not "sovereign."  That misses the point of Brown's objection.  And it misses the point of our constitutional structure.  It's the constitutional job of the judiciary to interpret the law.  How do they do that?  You can't ask the law you're interpreting, because you have to interpret it.  What to do?  Antonin Scalia, for instance, uses a dictionary.  Clarence Thomas, get this, natural law–whatever that is.

General discussion

Opposition party

5 Comments

The other week I was going to post something about how Obama reads criticism closely and takes it seriously.  This, I think, is a praiseworthy intellectual habit.  Perhaps the following item, however, means that he is taking it too far:

Barack Obama took the next big step in his Republican charm offensive on Tuesday night, when he dined with several of the nation's most prominent conservative pundits.

The president-elect arrived at the Chevy Chase, Md., home of syndicated columnist George Will shortly after 6:30 p.m., according to a press pool report. Greeting him at the residence were other luminaries of the conservative commentariat, including the Weekly Standard's William Kristol, New York Times columnist David Brooks, and Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post.

The odd-couple gathering led to speculation that Rush Limbaugh, who said that he was in D.C. for a "secret meeting," was also in attendance. "I'm just offering, a personal trip, nobody even has to know about this," the notorious and combative talk show host wrote on his website.

Alas, a source close to the transition confirms, Limbaugh was definitely not in attendance during the dinner affair — likely disappointing some in the conservative blogosphere, knowing full well the fury that would have caused among progressives.

Nevertheless, Obama's choice of dining partners seem likely to cause its fair share of hair-pulling and eye-rolling. As the pool reporter, Ken Bazinet of the New York Daily News, penned in his write up: "This is for real, folks. The bloggers are going to love this one."

Obama has pledged to be a uniter once in office. He's also said he is willing to take policy suggestions from any source, regardless of ideological affiliation, as long as they work. So far, he's living up to his word.

I wonder who did the cooking.

Appeal to the People, Argument Analysis, Begging the Question, General discussion

Same sex marriage and begging the question

39 Comments

This is a bit of a departure from our usual analysis of particular arguments in the media, but because these arguments are fairly common and because we've been hashing these issues out in the comments to the earlier post "5,000 Years," I thought I'd try to synthesize the analysis of the argument as I see it.

Is there a non-question begging (secular) argument for the following claim?

C: Same-sex relationships cannot be considered "marriage."

Setting aside certain circular arguments about tradition (like Rick Warren's which was originally being commented on), the best argument seems to rest on the premise:

P: A necessary condition of marriage is the biological possibility of procreation.

Here biological possibility has to be understood as satisfying the counter-factual condition:

BP: If the functional organs of procreation are working in a species typical way, procreation would be biologically possible.

This condition is meant to include infertile and older couples within the scope of the condition, while still excluding same sex couples. I am not, of course, endorsing this exclusion: the question is whether a good argument can be constructed for C, as a matter of logic, that could justify arguments against same-sex marriage. I am tempted to claim that there cannot be any such argument after considering the various arguments.

Because the argument is trading in essences and definitions it would seem to be deductive: That is, it argues for the impossibility of same-sex marriage by appeal to a definition/essence. It has the form of:

1. X is a necessary condition of Y.

2. Necessarily, Z does not have X.

3. Therefore, necessarily, Z is not Y.

Triangles must have straight sides. Necessarily, Circles do not have straight sides. Therefore, necessarily, circles are not Triangles. Or, Nougaty filling is a necessary condition of being a Three Musketeers bar. Necessarily, Toffee does not have a nougaty filling. Therefore, necessarily, toffee is not a Three Musketeer's bar.

As such this looks like a valid deductive argument. But, a critic might wonder whether P understood in the light of BP really says anything more the following implicit premise.

IP: Only heterosexual couples can be married.

If this is so, then the argument might reasonably be accused of begging the question. But determining when the question is begged needs to be handled carefully, since a begged question can always be resolved by appealing to some further argument that independently justifies the problematic premise.

So, the question then becomes, what independent reason can be provided for P/BP? What sort of "warrant" can be given to claim that marriage has an essential link to the biological possibility of procreation?

In the comments, we identified two distinct strategies:

a) Appeal to tradition/Generalization from past practices–this can range from some sort of descriptive anthropological claim, to some sort of generalization to a normative claim, or a most often a simple stipulation on the basis of past stipulation.

b) Appeal to social function of marriage as defining its essence (coupled with an argument that marriage is the best means for attaining the relevant goals).

It seems to me that (a) either begs the question if it appeals to tradition, or, fails to attain the universality that seems to be needed to underwrite P/BP (at most the generalization can show is that marriage has been understood to have an essential connection to the possibility of procreation, not that this is essential for it. And counter-examples are too many to make the universalization possible (old people getting married, infertile couples etc. And it's no good saying that marriage has just been socially constructed this way, since we are aiming for an essential connection.)

The appeal to tradition seems to me to beg the question insofar as it takes the following form: 

1.  Marriage has been understood (in the past) to require P/BP.

2. Therefore, P/BP

[I probably don't have the logic right here. I'm realizing as I write that I'm not quite clear on how "appeals to tradition" really work, though I think that they are typically bad arguments. I guess they're a sort of temporally dispersed ad populum.]

Even if we can avoid begging the question here, the problem with this argument is that insofar as it appeals to people's opinions about marriage, it relies on a convention, which doesn't seem to be able to underwrite a claim about essence. At most it underwrites a sort of stipulation which isn't adequate to the purposes of this argument.

The strategy of (b) fails for slightly different reasons. The argument seems to run something like this:

1. Marriages provide for stable procreative units.

2. Society has an interest in stable procreative units.

3. Therefore, Society has an interest in recognizing marriages that are means to stable procreative unit

and,

4. Therefore, Society does not have an interest in recognizing relationships as marriages that are not means to stable procreative units.

This is a fine argument as it stands, but it doesn't get close to showing that there is some sort of essential incoherence in the notion of a marriage for some other purpose (adoptive child-rearing for example). It needs to conclude something much stronger than this, something that would suggest that recognizing same-sex marriages is incoherent, since it aims at establishing P/BP. At most it has shown that from the perspective of society, whether there are same-sex marriages or not is a matter of ambivalence. I think typically the argument seems to succeed because it trades the elision of biological function and social function. A little dose of evolution seems to suggest that this necessity is somehow a species necessity, but I think those arguments are pretty empty. (That is, I don't think we can deduce the "right" social institutions from biology, though I certainly grant that there are lots of ways in which biological truths affect which institutions are desirable and which not). 

I'm not at all sure about much of this, and I'm sure there are strategies that I've missed. And certainly it is always open to the arguer to appeal to the Bible or personal communications with God to justify P/BP. But, as far as I can see, I cannot find a viable strategy to make the argument non-question begging. The problem is that the opponent of same-sex marriage must offer a very very strong argument that concludes impossibility if they want to trade on an putative "essence" of marriage. But, the arguments that would establish this putative "essence" of marriage seem to be either too weak to do so, or end up begging the question. The problem is that the "tradition" of heterosexual marriage might have arisen because it was socially useful (and perhaps still is) for managing procreation and the family, but that does not enail the necessary link between marriage and procreation. If this is so, then the whole strategy needs to be rethought, as it is doomed to failure. But, maybe I'm missing something obvious.

General discussion

Argumentum ad nit-picking?

1 Comment

Here's an interesting bad argument I think we've maybe touched on a few times before. Seems fallacious in the form described, but I'm not sure how to categorize it. Relevance? Ignoratio Elenchi?

1. Critics of W's policy X were right about the overall undesirability of X (because of hypothetical consequences Y).

2. But, those critics were mistaken in predicting the details of actual consequences Z as Y.

3. Thus, they were no more right about X than W.

You were right to tell me not to drink and drive, but not because I might wreck my car. It turns out I killed someone, so we're both right and we're both wrong about drunk driving. (You were right that I should not drink and drive, and I was right that the danger of wrecking my car was not the real reason to not drink and drive.) This would seem to be a nice ignoratio elenchi.

The difference between hypothetical consequences as reasons and unknown unintended consequences as reasons to do something seems to be an equivocation. Even if it turns out that I did not wreck my car, the danger of doing so is still a reason for not drinking and driving.

But the argument is interesting since forms of it seem to be good.

1. You said I had reason Y to do X.

2. I had reason Z to do X.

3. My not doing X is excusable because I didn't know that I had reason Z to do X though I knew that I did not have reason Y to do X.

Seems like sometimes the argument is really an attempt to conceal one failure in deliberation with another.

1. Your argument Y against policy X was a bad one.

2. And neither of us saw that there was a good argument Z against X.

3. Therefore, I wasn't wrong to do X. 

In its political employment I suspect that it hangs on the falsity of the second premise, or on a different form of culpability if 2 is true. Either 2 is true and therefore you're incompetent (you ought to have known), or 2 is false, and therefore you're foolish. Though the first side of the disjunction is undermined by the claim "even my critics didn't see this" and so I should not be culpable for not seeing it either."

 Anyone recall any good examples of this?

Your argument is invalid