{"id":4150,"date":"2013-04-23T21:19:23","date_gmt":"2013-04-24T02:19:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4150"},"modified":"2013-04-23T21:19:23","modified_gmt":"2013-04-24T02:19:23","slug":"just-little-old-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/?p=4150","title":{"rendered":"Just little old me…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dennis Prager’s post at NRO<\/a> today is literally a series of conservative talking points on Islam and terrorism.\u00c2\u00a0 All pretty much familiar fare, from identifying a persecution complex in their opponents (the irony!) to blaming the Left for encouraging them to their acts of violence, to just stopping short of calling Islam an ideology of indecency.\u00c2\u00a0 But it’s with the last line of thought\u00c2\u00a0 that Prager has an interesting line of argument.\u00c2\u00a0 He holds that “Any religion or ideology that is above good and evil produces enormous evil”, and then he plays to make a contrast.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, most religious and secular ideologues find preoccupation with human decency boring. The greatest moral idea in history, ethical monotheism, doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t excite most people.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

First, there are factual things in question.\u00c2\u00a0 One is that most of the ideologies run on making the case that they are the last and best hope for decency.\u00c2\u00a0 They wouldn’t be convincing otherwise.\u00c2\u00a0 Liberalism is posited on the appeal of decency, by the way.\u00c2\u00a0 Second, is ethical monotheism really “the greatest moral idea in history”?\u00c2\u00a0 Solve the problem of evil before you say that, buddy.\u00c2\u00a0 Moreover, I don’t even seen ‘ethical monotheism’ as really a moral idea — it’s more a meta-ethic, that God is the source of moral norms.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s more a metaphysical idea.\u00c2\u00a0 And aren’t there actual moral ideas that seem to be considerably more powerful than ‘ethical monotheism,’ anyhow?\u00c2\u00a0 Deontology?\u00c2\u00a0 Eudaimonistic ethics?\u00c2\u00a0 Consequentialism? (It’s one thing you can say for Roger Scruton is that he’d never write anything this stupid.\u00c2\u00a0 NRO and The American Spectator will miss his intellectual heft for sure.)<\/p>\n

Finally, I suspect Prager’s got a very specific monotheism in mind when he says this… but, you know, his favorite ethical monotheism doesn’t have a particularly good track record, either.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Would we want Christianity judged by the decisions made by George W. Bush?<\/p>\n

Factual questions aside, Prager’s case is interesting argumentative strategy.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s a kind of downplayer, but on his own side. As if to say, “Well, nobody pays attention to little old me… I just try to do my best to be moral and upright and stuff…”\u00c2\u00a0 The implicature of the speech act, of course, is to make the contrast — so as to say that popularity is a kind of negative authority of what’s right and true.<\/p>\n

I’ve started calling strategies like this ‘persecution strategies,’ those that set up the dialectical board in a way that makes it inappropriate to overtly challenge the view.\u00c2\u00a0 It runs:\u00c2\u00a0 this view has had a long line of critics and rejections, and most folks think it’s crazy.\u00c2\u00a0 But it hasn’t had a fair hearing.\u00c2\u00a0<\/em> The strategy, then, is to identify most of the going criticisms of the view as mere expressions of the standard knee-jerk rejection of the view.\u00c2\u00a0 Now, for sure, some views haven’t had a fair hearing, and it’s worth making the case they should be given it.\u00c2\u00a0 But, as we’ve noted with the iron man, not all views need to be fully developed before we can see they are losers. And sometimes, it’s not worth our time and effort to do the work.\u00c2\u00a0 Recently, in my survey of informal class, I’ve started calling this tactic the little view that could.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dennis Prager’s post at NRO today is literally a series of conservative talking points on Islam and terrorism.\u00c2\u00a0 All pretty much familiar fare, from identifying a persecution complex in their opponents (the irony!) to blaming the Left for encouraging them to their acts of violence, to just stopping short of calling Islam an ideology of … Continue reading Just little old me…<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,1,1214,282],"tags":[1126,1641,1642],"class_list":["post-4150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bad-explanations","category-general","category-iron-man-straw-man","category-narrativism","tag-iron-man-fallacy","tag-little-view-that-could","tag-persecution-strategy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4150"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4154,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4150\/revisions\/4154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenonsequitur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}