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On Being a Body / On Partaking of a Life Form / and On the Giving of Life of this Form to Lives of This and Other Forms

When I was an undergraduate, a number of what struck me as mutually supporting factors prompted me to convert to 'Popery,' as most of the American Founders, alas, would have called it - and as many, double-alas,  would have denounced it.  Two of these factors, both of which seemed to me somehow to be particularly deeply connected, were especially compelling. 

The first such factor was that I seemed always to see humbly dressed folk in faded bluejeans and plaid shirts delivering boxes of donated items to the food & clothing pantry operated by St. John's Catholic Parish in Lawrence, KS, whose parking lot lay across the street from my window.  The same humbly dressed folk, still humbly dressed, could then be found at Sunday mass, which I attended a few times as a curious onlooker, then as a guest.  I was struck by how, in a sense, these humble yet generously giving people seemed to treat Sundays and other days as being in a sense continuous - as being of a piece - and in so doing appeared to be treating their liturgical lives and their giving lives as both being of this selfsame piece.  The parishoners, in other words, did not doll up on Sundays and strike worshipful postures, then dress down on other days and forget about those Sundays.  They dressed the same, and in a certain crucial sense acted the same, on all days - worshipping throughout the week, in effect, with the shape taken by their worship just slightly differing between Sundays and other days.  'Just slightly' in view of the second factor that somehow moved me...

The second factor was that there was always a corpse represented on the cross in these peoples' church.  Corpse, corpor, corporeal.  A dead body.  For some reason that really hit me.  It seemed important.  The dude these people worshipped and wept for had a body.  He was a body.  Somehow that made the whole thing more 'real' to this perhaps primitive, over-tactile,post-adolescent in a way that empty crosses at other kinds of churches I'd visited by that point did not.  (I might have mentioned something about this in my very first post here some several years back.)  I know that the empty cross at these other places is said to represent a triumph - 'He is risen!' - and all of that; and sure, I buy that.  But for some reason I still needed the body.  (Habeus corpus!)  And, what was more, that broken body seemed somehow connected to the broken people on whose behalves the congregants during the week were dropping off all of those boxes of supplies.  And both that body and the broken people whom it seemed connected to seemed also to serve as reminders of some sort that we're all broken in various ways.  It was in this sense, then, in addition to the sense made manifest in the non-changing mode of their dress, that these people's Sunday and weekday forms of worship seemed to me continuous - minor variations on one major theme.

And so I converted. 

Now it seems to me, believe it or not, that all of this bears quite directly upon - and is born quite as directly upon by - several subjects that have figured importantly in discussions here at our site and at Mirror of Justice of late. 

One such subject, to which I will confine myself for now, is the matter of 'post-birth abortion' as advocated by two strange (Swiftian?) authors whose recent peer-reviewed article Robert George has recently shared over at Mirror.  I gather, from an admittedly cursory reading, that the authors advocate allowance of this form of homicide on the same ground that many advocate allowance of more conventionally understood abortion - essentially, on grounds that it is 'persons,' understood in a particular sense to which I shall attend in a moment, whom legal and moral rights aim to protect, while foetuses and newborns are not yet persons in the requisite sense. 

As our own Patrick O'Donnell will recall from a disucussion at Dorf on Law to which he and I both contributed about two and a half years ago, for some reason I have never been quite able to find any force in the argument from 'personhood.'  This has been so ever since first I encountered a rendition of it in (the often wonderful) Professor Dworkin's book of 1993.  (Life's Dominion, if I recall correctly, which might better have been titled Personhood's Dominion?)  For what I now suspect is the very same reason, I have never been able to find any force in cognate arguments offered by some other philosophers, notably David Velleman, to the effect that cows' and other animals' lives lack value.   Somehow all such arguments always struck me as what I was tempted, for some reason that I couldn't then and perhaps still can't articulate, to label 'thin,' 'watery,' 'non-viscous,' even 'airy' or 'vaporous.'  An impression of a sort of 'unbearable lightness of nonbeing' seemed to accompany my reading them.  They were 'insubstantial' relative to what they purported to be about - life, be it human or other animal life - even if 'deep' or insightful relative to what they were actually about - personhood, understood as something that is in fact categorically distinct from life even if dependent on life as its essentially intermingled substrate when 'embodied.'

Trying to make sense of those impressions now, what I seem to come up with is something like this:  What these arguments all appear to have in common is two theses, the first of which just doesn't seem to register with me, at least relative to the argumentative purpose for which it is deployed.  This first thesis is sometimes labeled 'value-internalism,' and has it that what is valuable in connection with some creature is only what can be valued, per some form of consciousness how ever rudimentary, by that creature.  The second thesis is sometimes labeled 'wholism' but might be better labeled 'narrativalism,' and has it that a life - a full, temporally extended life - can be ('internally') valued by the creature living that life only insofar as the creature in question possesses a conception, or, in a more Kantian idiom, a 'representation' of that life.  Put these two theses together and you reach the unsurprising conclusion that 'the life,' qua life, of a creature lacking in consciousness of its own life as a temporally extended, narratival whole is ... valueless.

I think that those who argue that cows' and other creatures' lives are devoid of value, on the one hand - people like Velleman - and those who argue that unborn and newborn humans' lives are devoid of value, on the other hand - people like Dworkin circa 1993? - are all in essence making the same argument.  And somehow I find it ultimately unsatisfactory in both cases - largely, I think, for reasons given here, in an argument that I offered in defense of animal rights against Vellemanians in the aforementioned discussion at Dorf on Law to which Patrick and I both contributed.  (How do you like that?  I'm defending animal rights, as Singer has notably done, on the basis of an argument - more on which in a moment - that if correct means that Singer is wrong about infanticide.)  The argument is titled What's the Harm? 

So, what's the harm?  And what's unsatisfactory about 'internalism'?  Well, the short-playing version to which I confine myself here is that I think that it appeals to the wrong 'level' of internality, so to speak.  Harm to a particular kind of creature - a creature that exemplifies a particular life form - it seems to me, can only be understood by reference to characteristics that are internal to that creature's form of life, rather than internal to its form, if any, of consciousness.  Such forms of consciousness, how ever rudimentary or sophisticated, are surely internal to the forms of life with which they are associated, but they don't exhaust those forms; and waxing or waning, flourishing or withering, pertain to all characteristics, not just the consciousness characteristics, that are internal to the form.  For they pertain to the form, not just to features of the form.

So, cows wax and flourish under some conditions, while they wane and wither under other conditions.  Likewise for all other forms of life - all of these remarkable, beautiful, gorgeous, miraculous forms! - the particular conditions varying with the particular forms.  To impose conditions upon cows, cats, crows, or other critters that prompt their waning or withering rather than their waxing and flourishing, in turn, seems to me to be always prima facie wrongful unless there is some compelling reason to do so - reason that itself sounds in life, and reason that does not needlessly or gratuitously or cavalierly subordinate some lives to other lives.   

Human beings, of course, wax and flourish under different conditions than do other creatures, though of course there is significant and growing overlap between the sets of conditions as we proceed from forms of life that bear less, to forms that bear more, in common with human life.  And of course the same goes for waning and withering.  And narratival consciousness is of course a particularly prominent characteristic among all of those characteristics that jointly constitute the human form of life, which of course renders it not all that surprising that some might find themselves tempted simply to equate, in effect, human life to that characteristic, or to equate value in connection with that life to value in connection with the living human being's self-conscious conception or self-representation of that life.  But the fact is that it is but one of the many constitutive characteristics of a human life, and there seems no reason what ever to interpret 'value' solely by reference to that characteristic rather than by reference to the whole lifeform of which it is but one constitutive characteristic.   

It also seems to me, on essentially the same grounds as seem to me to underlie what I just said, that early, late, and intervening 'stages' of a life within some form, rather like the 'organic' or constitutive characteristics of that form, have to be understood as resting in deep unity with one another.  All such stages, just like all of those characteristics, are jointly constitutive of the form of life in relation to which they represent or amount to stages.  If this is right, then it is no more permissible to inflict unjustified harm - harm as, again, understood relative to the life form in question - on a particular creature in its 'early' or 'late' life than it is to inflict such harm on that creature in its 'middle' life.  For harm is done the creature - the creature as a representative of the life form - not to the 'creature-phase' as representative of ... what?, that phase alone? 

To think otherwise that as I've just suggested, it somehow seems to me, is to fall into a sort of category error not unlike that of those amusing late 18th Century 'empiricists' and early 20 Century 'positivists' who took themselves to be seeing 'apple-sides' and 'color patches' rather than seeing apples and colored objects, or to be tasting 'pineapple tastes' rather than pineapples.  The living thing is neither but one of its characteristics nor one of its stages or phases.  The characteristics and stages are characteristics and stages of the creature; and it is the creature, not the characteristics or stages, that waxes or wanes, flourishes or withers, is accorded respect or is gratuitously and unjustifiably harmed.  

Once we move, then, as I believe that we must, from 'internalism' understood by reference to consciousness ('internality to consciousness') to 'internalism' understood by reference to life form ('internality to form'), arguments like Velleman's against the value of bovine life, and 'Minerva's' (one of the earlier mentioned Swiftian authors) against the value of owl ... er, human life both show themselves for puzzlingly arbitrary if not clearly category-inapt.  For once we make the move that I am describing, we see the various forms of consciousness experienced by creatures of various forms simply to be aspects of living those various life forms rather than identical to or even exhaustive of those forms, while value for its part pertains always to forms rather than to aspects of forms.    

To take life's value to be internal to life-consciousness - and, worse, to narratival life-consciousness, to 'personhood' - rather than to life-form, then, seems to me in the final analysis to be to engage in a species of reductionism that is not unlike triumphalism, chauvinism, parochialism... even certain forms of racism and 'imperialism.'  And it is to do so not only in the form of 'speciesism' - as Singer, ironically, would once have called it - but, worse yet, in the form of 'life-stageism' within that already objectionable speciesism.  For it is to treat internality to one constitutive feature of one particular life form, a feature available even to that form only at some of its stages - viz. narratival consciousness - as internality simpliciter.  (Hence the use, perhaps, by those who indulge this view, of the term 'internalism' alone rather than 'human narratival consciousness internalism,' which latter name would both (a) better specify the view, and (b) manifest at once what is problematic about the view.)

All right, so this all takes us back to where we began.  Why do I find the argument from personhood, and with it Vellemanian 'internalism' plus 'wholism,' somehow 'thin' and 'vaporous' - 'bloodless,' as it were?  I think it's probably because I find it bodyless, just like those crosses that left me so cold.  I think the same thing that made that body on that Cross at St. John's Parish in Lawrence somehow 'resonate' with 'me,' in other words, might be what prevents the argument from personhood from thus resonating.  Our embodiment would seem to be essential to who and what we are; and what has value in our judgment, it would seem to me, must accordingly itself relate back to embodiment. 

I suspect that this is why resurrection, which of course many Christians of various persuasions are soon again to celebrate this spring, matters to so many.  It's why the Hebraic tradition which has it that we rise on Judgment Day rather than convert to ghosthood and hover about is the tradition with which many Jews, Christians, Muslims and others claim continuity.  And it's presumably also why Platonic metampsychosis, disembodied spirithood, being a brain in a vat, and so forth are all so unappealing to some of us.  We won't settle for being merely 'persons.'  That's not what we value.  We want it all - human life, in all its stages, through all its course, with all of its defining features, in all of their organic, gorgeous unity.  Wholeness of the life.  That is what we value, and it's that - at the very least - by reference to which we so much as understand all value.  

Nor, then, will we settle for regarding those whom we love and care for as being merely 'persons,' let alone as 'person-phases' or 'life-stages.'  (Again, we taste apples, not mere 'apple-tastes.')  They are lives, whole lives, partaking of whole life forms.  And this shows up in what we give, especially when we give out of love.  Those people who dropped off those items every day at St. John's Parish dropped off items usable by whole human organisms, not just persons.  They brought foodstuffs, drink, clothing, blankets, and the like - things that beings with bodies need.  Sure, there was 'food for thought' and 'food for conscious play' as well, inasmuch as they brought books and magazines and boardgames and the like.  But that is just the point.  They brought all of it - just as those who donate things to 'animal shelters' donate food and bedding and 'playtoys' alike - things associated with the flourishing of, hence with what is valueable to, the per se valuable recipients along the multiple dimensions of their flourishing. 

And what is true of giving here surely is true of defending.  In giving of our lives on behalf of and in defense of other lives, we are living not merely personhood, but life, and giving to and for not just persons, but lives.  

Again a deep restorative Lenten season to all who are partaking of it.   And to all of our sisters and brothers of other traditions, as well as to all other creatures, to life, to life, la Kayim! 

      

(Cross-posted in modified form at Mirror of Justice)                 

Do computers calculate? follow rules?

“Computers cannot correctly be described as following rules any more than planets can be correctly described as complying with laws. [….] Computers were not built to ‘engage in rule-governed manipulation of symbols,’ they were built to produce results that well coincide with rule-governed, correct manipulation of symbols. For computers can no more follow a rule than a mechanical calculator can. A machine can execute operations that accord with a rule, provided all the causal links built into it function as designed and assuming that the design ensures the generation of a regularity in accordance with the chosen rule or rules. But for something to constitute following a rule, the mere production of regularity in accordance with a rule is not sufficient. A being can be said to following a rule only in the context of a complex practice invoking actual and potential activities of justifying, noticing mistakes, and correcting them by reference to the rule, criticizing deviations from the rule, and, if called upon, explaining an action as being in accordance with the rule [I would add here that this includes understanding the nature of the limits of a rule and what it might entail or mean to go outside or beyond the rule, perhaps even what it means to act in the ‘spirit’ of a rule]. The determination of an act as being correct, in accordance with the rule, is not a causal determination but a logical one.”—Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker, in Maxwell Bennett, Daniel Dennett, Peter Hacker, John Searle, and Daniel Robinson, Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007)

“That the events in the ALU [Arithmetic Logic Unit of a computer] seem to be intrinsically calculations or logical operations reflects only our habit of reading back from our consciousness of what machines can do for us into the events which take place within machines. Although it is a useful shorthand to speak of an ALU ‘performing calculations’ or ‘logical operations,’ it is obvious that what is going on in the ALU is not by itself either calculation or logic. In order to count as performing a logical operation or calculation one has to know what one is doing—one has to understand the significance of it. This understanding, this awareness, is denied the ALU.”—Raymond Tallis

“The frame problem—the fact that computational devices can operate successfully only with frames of reference that are very rigidly specified, with a narrow ‘world’ that has to be installed into them—underlines one of the fundamental differences between complex automata and conscious beings. The frame within which a conscious being operates is infinite, or at least, unbounded. [….] The explicit rules that may shape consciousness arise out of a background of explicitness; or the soil out of which rules grow, the solution out of which they crystallise, is a continuum of explicitness, a field of explicitness. The computer has only discrete countable rules, not this continuum of explicitness, this ‘rule mass,’ this boundless, ruly world.”—Raymond Tallis, The Explicit Animal: A Defence of Human Consciousness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999 ed.)

Or: Deep Blue did not play chess.

Santorum, Kennedy, and Religion

Rick Santorum has recently attacked John Kennedy’s speech to the Houston Ministerial Association on separation of church and state. In some respects, if his interpretation of the speech is correct, he has a point. Santorum maintains that the separation of church and state should not be absolute, that there should be a role for people of faith in the public square, and that government should not be able to impose its views on people of faith. On these three points, he is at least partially correct. Separation of church and state has never been absolute in the United States. Religious arguments have always been made in the public square. “In God We Trust” appears on the coins. (Removing the slogan would be a political non-starter). In the absence of overriding reasons, government should not be able to restrict the actions of people of faith when it violates their free exercise of religion.

I assume that Santorum believes that there are limits on the free exercise of religion. I doubt that he would prevent government from restricting a religion that places human sacrifice at the heart of its liturgy. I do wonder whether he thinks that government should be able to give religious reasons for its actions. Our current system welcomes religious arguments in the public square, but requires that any government action responding to those arguments must be grounded in a fully adequate secular justification.

Finally, the reports of Santorum’s remarks do not discuss his position on the central issue in Kennedy’s speech. Kennedy was responding to the argument that as a Catholic, he would be taking his orders from the Vatican. In response, he took refuge in church and state constitutionalism. I think this was unsatisfactory. As a Catholic and as a President, he was required to act in a moral way as he understood morality so long as he could give a secular justification for his actions. The deeper question was what kind of Catholic he was. Most Catholics take the views of the Pope and the Bishops seriously, but if in conscience they cannot accept the teachings of church leaders, they do not. Kennedy’s speech should have emphasized that as President, he ultimately had to answer to his conscience, not the Pope’s. To put it another way, Kennedy’s speech should have emphasized freedom of conscience, not separation of church and state.

No doubt, Santorum rejects some statements of church leaders which he does not regard as official parts of the Magisterium. Perhaps he accepts all parts of the Magisterium. But I wonder if he believes he is required to accept all parts of the Magisterium regardless of what would otherwise be his personal views. Whatever the religious and moral merits of a position requiring acceptance of the Magisterium no matter what, it is a political cross that is rather heavy to bear. If Santorum believes that there is a strong role for moral conscience against church teachings (as Aquinas did, even if it led to excommunication), he should say so.   

 

 

 

Forgive Us Our Trespasses: A Brief Lenten Meditation on the 'Debt Deflation of the Soul'

The analogy is perhaps a bit strained, but only a bit: That posture which many of us take as bright, shining, miraculous but nevertheless blemished beings at Lent is not altogether unlike that which many non-wealthy folk take as fabulously creative and value-adding, while nevertheless liability-burdened, beings during debt deflations like that which our national economy's experienced since 2008.

In both cases, ordinarily vital, bouyant and energetic creatures, freighted with obligations that can never be fully repaid, necessarily hunker down and go quiet for a time. And in both cases, there is something profoundly healthy and natural, rather like inhaling and exhaling - like breathing - in this cycling between inwardness, self-reassessment and pecatum-purging on the one hand, outwardness, self-giving and action-in-the-world on the other. Few if any can put the point better than did Lao-tzu, Heraklitos or, especially, the Ecclesiast: there is indeed 'a time to every purpose/ under Heaven.'

But there might also appear to be an important difference between the two cases, at least on the surface of things. For in the Lenten case, after the tomb comes the rising. Easter Sunday follows Ash Wednesday and Good Friday as a matter of divine course, quite irrespective of what we as responsible agents might do. The debt is forgiven no matter the merit.

New life and resumed growth in the sphere of temporal economic activity, it might be thought by contrast, need not follow as a matter of course. Retrenching citizens who hunker down under debt overhang can drain economies of their lifeblood indefinitely for year after collectively unnecessary year, laying waste to lives, livelihoods, even peace and stability. Such is one lesson that the theory of longterm underemployment equilibria and liquidity traps, as well as the recent 'lost decades' experience of Japan and the less recent global experience of the 1930s and -40s, all make plain. Any counterpart to this in 'the spirit realm' would require that there be no Easter Sunday reliably following Good Friday in that way day follows night.

I'd like to suggest, however, that beneath the surface of things the two cases still bear a deep inner unity. For just as the temporal debt deflation requires the collectively focussed, determined, and concentrated work of 'Jubilee'-style debt-restructuring and -forgiveness as well as public investment to trim back the overhang from both ends, reopen the door and jolt people back to employment-productive activity, so does full emergence from Lent require both (a) an act of forgiveness and (b) active appropriation by all of us as individuals and as faith communities of the resurrection gift.  (To hold off or hold out on that active appropriation, I suspect, is what the Medievals had in mind in describing the sin of despair - a full theologico-categorical counterpart, it would seem, to the temporal economic category of deflation-prolonging depressed 'animal spirits.')  

Easter Sunday might well follow Ash Wednesday and Good Friday as a matter of divine course, then, but there is neither anything 'automatic' or 'mechanical' about it, nor anyone who grows in response to it without zestfully seizing and acting upon it. In that sense, for each of us, both our and another's responsible - and indeed responsive - agency is as needful in the 'divine economy' as it is in the temporal.

Let us, then, remain inward-turned and self-cleansing for as long as is needed in both spheres right now. But let us also, soon, vigorously act upon what we thus learn and receive when the time comes - as surely it will, come this spring.

Incidentally, although I have mentioned and linked here to the Way Forward piece on our ongoing debt deflation before, I've recently learned there's a video version of the same. It stems from an event in DC late last year at which my co-authors Dan Alpert and Nouriel Roubini and I shared the podium with the redoubtable Liaquat Ahmed, Bruce Bartlett, and Leo Hendry. Also present were a host of great American public servants like Senator Don Riegle, as well as such luminaries as Dean Baker, NPR's Marilyn Geewax, and PBS's Hedrick Smith. Interested readers can view it here.

A restorative Lenten season to all.

(Cross-posted at Mirror of Justice)

John Courtney Murray, SJ

Yesterday, I posted a passage from Father Murray's "Memo to Cardinal Cushing on Contraception Legislation" (here).  Earlier today, I posted a link to an editorial in AMERICA that reflects Murray's strong influence (here).  Now I see that one of Murray's foremost intellectual heirs--David Hollenbach, who is, as Murray was, a Jesuit priest--has published a reflection on Murray's work in the inaugural issue of a promising new periodical:  Religious Freedom, Morality and Law:  John Courtney Murray Today, 1 Journal of Moral Theology 69-91 (2012).  The article is available in full here.  David Hollenbach holds the University Chair in Human Rights and International Justice at Boston College, where he is a member of the Department of Theology.  See also David Hollenbach & Thomas A. Shannon, A Balancing Act:  Catholic Teaching on the Church's Rights--and the Rights of All, AMERICA, March 5, 2012 (here)."

Policy, Not Liberty

That's the title of the editorial in the new issue of AMERICA:  The National Catholic Weekly (which is a Jesuit publication).

An excerpt:

"By stretching the religious liberty strategy to cover the fine points of health care coverage, the campaign devalues the coinage of religious liberty. The fight the bishop’s conference won against the initial mandate was indeed a fight for religious liberty and for that reason won widespread support. The latest phase of the campaign, however, seems intended to bar health care funding for contraception. Catholics legitimately oppose such a policy on moral grounds. But that opposition entails a difference over policy, not an infringement of religious liberty. It does a disservice to the victims of religious persecution everywhere to inflate policy differences into a struggle over religious freedom. Such exaggerated protests likewise show disrespect for the freedom Catholics have enjoyed in the United States, which is a model for the world—and for the church."

The entire editorial is available here.

That was then (contraception), this is now (same-sex marriage) ...

"[T]he practice [contraception], undertaken in the interests of 'responsible parenthood,' has received official sanction by many religious groups within the community.  It is difficult to see how the state can forbid, as contrary to public morality, a practice that numerous religious leaders approve as morally right.  The stand taken by these religious groups may be lamentable from the Catholic moral point of view.  But it is decisive from the point of view of law and jurisprudence . . ."   —John Courtney Murray, SJ, “Memo to Cardinal Cushing on Contraception Legislation” (n.d., mid-1960s), http://woodstock.georgetown.edu/library/murray/1965f.htm.

 

Faith, Bad Faith, and Petroleum Prices

    Republican politicians' desires at present appear, on the surface at least, to be incoherent in the way many children's are.  On the one hand they would certainly abuse the President were he not pressing upon Iran's nuclear ambitions with sanctions and threats of worse to come.  Yet then on the other hand they abuse him when those sanctions have their effect, removing Iranian petroleum from world markets and temporarily driving up global prices. 

    

     The President, most economists, and other adults seem to realize something that current Republican politicians and very young children do not - namely, that most benefits, including that  Republican-defined benefit which is the curtailing of 'rogue' regimes' nuclear ambitions, come at some cost even if sometimes but temporary cost.  The sooner that Republican politicians grow up to recognize this, one might hope, the sooner we might address our many national challenges - including longterm budget and tax code challenges - like adults.

 

   But perhaps some of the politicians in question are not simply children.  Perhaps they're just BS-ers.  After all, not long ago they harrangued the President for being 'soft on terror.'  That became impossible last May.  Next they abused him for the underperformance of the economy they had destroyed.  Now that those few modest measures the President's been able to pass over their obstructions begin to show some effect, they must disapprove of him for something else.  What?  Well, maybe the HHS mandate?  Whoops, that's been taken care of.  What next?  Well, naturally, the consequences of the sanctons regime they themselves cry for.  That way, he can't win.  Now they've got 'im!

 

   The problem, of course, is that if there's nothing the President can do to 'win' in their eyes, we've a pretty good indication that what is before their eyes doesn't matter.  And yet they pronounce and pontificate anyway.  We've a term for that in less highbrow circles.  We call it 'bullsh[__].' 

In more dignified circles we call it 'dishonesty,' 'indifference to truth.'  And that is a grave character deficit. 

 

   The only alternative to this explanation of Republican politicians' behavior these days I can think of is more innocent but no less a matter of defect.  Perhaps there is some bizarre 'faith' that these people maintain, to the effect that the President really is 'Satan' or some such, such that by him ye shall know his fruits, rather than by his fruits knowing him?  That's a bit extreme as attributions of irrationality to Republican politicians go, but perhaps it is true of some of them.  I really don't know.

    

    Which ever the ultimate explanation, it's not looking good.  The question would seem to be:  Perverse Faith or Bad Faith?   

Another District Court Finds DOMA Unconstitutional

Yesterday, Disctrict Court Judge Jeffrey White granted the plaintiff's summary judgment motion and ordered OPM to enroll the same-sex spouse of a federal court employee in its benefit program in a 43-page opinion finding DOMA to be unconstitutional on equal protection grounds. White was a George W. Bush appointee.

See http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2017573133_gaymarriage23.html and --- F.Supp.2d ----, 2012 WL 569685 (N.D.Cal.)

Bradley Manning, Solitary Confinement and Occupy 4 Prisoners

 

Today US Army Private Bradley Manning is to be formally charged with numerous crimes at Fort Meade, Maryland.   Manning, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by members of the Icelandic Parliament, is charged with releasing hundreds of thousands of documents exposing secrets of the US government to the whistleblower website Wikileaks. These documents exposed lies, corruption and crimes by the US and other countries.  The Bradley Manning defense team points out accurately that much of what was published by Wikileaks was either not actually secret or should not have been secret.

 

The Manning prosecution is a tragic miscarriage of justice.  US officials are highly embarrassed by what Manning exposed and are shooting the messenger.  As Glen Greenwald, the terrific Salon writer, has observed, President Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers for espionage than all other presidents combined. 

 

One of the most outrageous parts of the treatment of Bradley Manning is that the US kept him in illegal and torturous solitary confinement conditions for months at the Quantico Marine base in Virginia.  Keeping Manning in solitary confinement sparked challenges from many groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU and the New York Times.  

 

Human rights’ advocates rightly point out that solitary confinement is designed to break down people mentally.  Because of that, prolonged solitary confinement is internationally recognized as a form of torture.  The conditions and practices of isolation are in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Convention against Torture, and the UN Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination.

 

Medical experts say that after 60 days in solidary peoples’ mental state begins to break down.  That means a person will start to experience panic, anxiety, confusion, headaches, heart palpitations, sleep problems, withdrawal, anger, depression, despair, and over-sensitivity. Over time this can lead to severe psychiatric trauma and harms like psychosis, distortion of reality, hallucinations, mass anxiety and acute confusion. Essentially, the mind disintegrates.

 

That is why the United Nations special rapporteur on torture sought to investigate Manning’s solitary confinement and reprimanded the US when the Army would not let him have an unmonitored visit.

 

History will likely judge Manning as heroic as it has Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers.

 

It is important to realize that tens of thousands of other people besides Manning are held in solitary confinement in the US today and every day.  Experts estimate a minimum of 20,000 people are held in solitary in supermax prisons alone, not counting thousands of others in state and local prisons who are also held in solitary confinement.  And solitary confinement is often forced on Muslim prisoners, even pre-trial people who are assumed innocent, under federal Special Administrative Measures.

 

In 1995, the U.N. Human Rights Committee stated that isolation conditions in certain U.S. maximum security prisons were incompatible with international standards. In 1996, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture reported on cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment in U.S. supermax prisons. In 2000, the U.N. Committee on Torture roundly condemned the United States for its treatment of prisoners, citing supermax prisons. In May 2006, the same committee concluded that the United States should "review the regimen imposed on detainees in supermax prisons, in particular, the practice of prolonged isolation."

John McCain said his two years in solitary confinement were torture. "It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance effectively than any other form of mistreatment." The reaction of McCain and many other victims of isolation torture were described in an excellent 2009 New Yorker article on isolation by Atul Gawande.  Gawande concluded that prolonged isolation is objectively horrifying, intrinsically cruel, and more widespread in the U.S. than any country in the world.

This week hundreds of members of the Occupy movement merged forces with people advocating for human rights for prisoners in demonstrations in California, New York, Ohio, and Washington DC.  They call themselves Occupy 4 Prisoners.  Activists are working to create a social movement for serious and fundamental changes in the US criminal system.

 

One of the major complaints of prisoner human rights activists is the abuse of solitary confinement in prisons across the US.  Prison activist Mumia Abu-Jamal said justice demands the end of solitary, “It means the abolition of solitary confinement, for it is no more than modern-day torture chambers for the poor.”  Pelican Bay State Prison in California, the site of a hunger strike by hundreds of prisoners last year, holds over 1000 inmates in solitary confinement, some as long as 20 years.

 

At the Occupy Prisoners rally outside San Quentin prison, the three American hikers who were held for a year in Iran told of the psychological impact of 14 months of solitary confinement.  Sarah Shourd said the time without human contact drove her to beat the walls of her cell until her knuckles bled.

 

When Manning was held in solitary he was kept in his cell 23 hours a day for months at a time.  The US government tortured him to send a message to others who might consider blowing the whistle on US secrets.  At the same time, tens of thousands of others in the US are being held in their cells 23 hours a day for months, even years at a time.  That torture is also sending a message.

 

Thousands stood up with Bradley Manning and got him released from solitary.  People must likewise stand up with the thousands of others in solitary as well. 

 

So, stand in solidarity with Bradley Manning and fight against his prosecution.  And stand also against solitary confinement of the tens of thousands in US jails and prisons.  Check out the Bradley Manning Support Network, Solitary Watch, and Occupy 4 Prisoners for ways to participate.

 

A version of this article with sources is available. You can reach Bill at[email protected]

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HHS vs. OWS: Of First Amendment Prudence and Jurisprudence

One of the loveliest upshots of that Friday and weekend work with the New York Fed that I mentioned two days ago has been the opportunity that it has afforded to spend time with, get to know, and ultimately join some of the banking and economic policy committees of the OWS movement.  (Zuccotti Park is but two blocks from the Fed and my little Wall Street apartment.)  In this connection, like very many people across America and the world, I thought Mayor Bloomberg's 'crackdown' on the movement this past November wrong-headed.  One upshot of that conviction was this OpEd published in the New York Daily News at the time, a longer rendition of which was posted on Dorf on Law here. 

It strikes me now that there is an instructive analogy to be drawn between that case and the case of the first rendition of the HHS's mandate - 'Mandate 1.0' - that we've all discussed here over the past several weeks.  The link has to do with the 'prudence' one might hope to find in such government actions as sometimes implicate First Amendment jurisprudence or the values given expression in that jusrisprudence.  Pursuant to this prudence, wise government functionaries accommodate exercises of First-Amendment-implicating freedoms even when not, strictly speaking, constitutionally required to do so.  Why do we hope, as I put it, to find this form of prudence in government decisions?  I think there are are least two complementary reasons.  One is that our political society at large often learns much from that 'witness' which is the flowering and flourishing of 'alternative' takes on many practices and lifeways that majorities have come to take for granted.  Another is that individual citizens often grow and flower as human souls both through witnessing and through participating in such experiments - recapitulating, in their less fateful and momentous but nevertheless important ways, the transformative experience of the 'upper room.'   

For my part, I've found the inspiringly earnest, insistently pluralistic, and above all the determinedly democratic egalitarian culture that flowered in Zuccotti Park a particularly salutary case in point - so starkly so that I very much hope those who are reading this post will read the descriptions provided in the two articles linked to above.  (The full length version at Dorf on Law includes brief description of the 'Tree of Life' at which multiple faiths were officially represented and honored in Zuccotti, including that of the many members of the Catholic Worker movement who were present throughout the 'occupation.')  But likewise important cases in point are, quite often, the lifeways and worldviews lived and given 'witness' by the healthcare-providing, education-supplying, and other institutions founded by our many faith communities.  Hence my provisional welcoming, along with that by many others, of the HHS's recent announcement that Mandate 2.0, once more fully specified, will indeed be accommodative.  I await that further specification as eagerly as I do the return of the 'Occupiers' to Zuccotti Park come this spring.   

(Cross-posted at Mirror of Justice)

Assisting Families by Preventing Avoidable Home Foreclosures: The Home Mortgage Bridge Loan Assistance Act of 2012

Here is another post prompted in part by Michael's kindly getting us back to the matter of social justice this week...

As some of our readers might know, I moonlight on Fridays and weekends at the New York Fed, an involvement which stems from my academic involvement in monetary and financial law both domestically and globally considered.  A large part of that bailiwick, in turn, is occupied these days by attention to the all-important mortgage markets - and, less coldly and bloodlessly, the families that owe mortgage debt in those still troubled markets. 

In the wake of the bubble and burst that culminated in 2008, as we know, many American families have been left with mortgages that are 'under water.'  That is to say that their debts, denominated as they are at fixed rates, have not plummetted as have the variable rates of their market-valued homes.  This in turn means that many families will be faced with near-bankruptcy and possible foreclosure unless and until some form of mortgage-restructuring, probably involving principal write-downs accompanied by shared-appreciation agreements and capital-regulatory forbearance, can be done on a larger scale than HARP, HAMP, and other initiatives thus far have proved able to do in the face of creditor collective action problems. 

Such is one upshot of Dan Alpert's, Nouriel Roubini's and my Way Forward white paper to which Rick Garnett kindly drew Mirror of Justice readers' attention last October when Joe Nocera discussed it in his NYT column.  And so, much of what I do these days concerns how we might set about that large, formidable task as described in The Way Forward. 

As it happens, however, there also are many mortgages faced with possible foreclosure that has little to do with 'underwater' status or any other difficulty other than temporary un- or under-employment of the sort that we often experience in times of macroeconomic slump.  Because all it takes is 60 days' delinquency to trigger default and foreclosure on many mortgage contracts, mortgagors who are temporarily laid off or partly laid off can, with their families, find themselves suddenly faced with loss of a home through little if any fault of their own notwithstanding their general creditworthiness. 

The harms that these innocent people face, moreover, ultimately redound to the harm of their lenders, their neighborhoods, the home and mortgage markets and the broader macro-economy as well.  Rigidities introduced by the lending contracts, moreover - particularly those that are securitized - typically prevent even value-maximizing forbearance or adjustment on the part of servicers.  We are accordingly faced with a classic market failure that harms all concerned parties.

Against this backdrop, a colleague - Michael Campbell - and I have drafted legislation inspired by a highly successful Pennsylvania program that comes down to us from back in the great Robert Casey days.  We call ours the Home Mortgage Bridge Loan Assistance Act (HMBLAA). 

Pennsylvania's Home Emergency Mortgage Assistance Program (HEMAP), upon which HMBLAA is loosely patterned with the benefit of hindsight, has a near 30-year track record of keeping lenders paid, families in their homes, and the public fisc almost entirely unaffected.  It has managed this simply by extending temporary bridge loan assistance to families whose breadwinners are temporarily unemployed or underemployed through no fault of their own, which loans are repaid in full once employment resumes.  It is made to order for times of temporary slump like the present.

Michael's and my plan incorporates many administrative lessons learned from the HEMAP experience.  The New York City Bar Association - on whose Banking Law Committee we both sit, Michael as Chair - and now the New York State Bar and the New York State Bankers Association all now have come down in support.  Our hope, as well as our now increasingly reasonable-looking belief, is that not only New York, but other states too, as well as Congress, will soon pass HMBLAA and/or counterpart legislation much like it.  It could work very well in states like Ohio, Indiana, and others disproportionately hit by the nation's current economic woes.   

Michael and I have received much in the way of helpful suggestion from private and public sector lawyers and financiers alike in the process of developing this proposal, but can always do with more.  I hope, then, that interested readers might click on the links below and let me know what they think.  The first link is (once again) to the statute itself.  The second is to a white paper we've drafted in support of the statute, complete with a regulatory impact analysis conducted by colleagues at the Fed.  Please let us know what you think!

The Home Mortgage Bridge Loan Assistance Act of 2012

HMBLAA White Paper 

Thanks again to all. 

(Cross-posted in part at Mirror of Justice)

Are Downton Abbey and the Help Mirrors of Reality?

For doubts, see http://www.alternet.org/story/154201/%27downton_abbey%27_and_%27the_help%27--what_their_nostalgic_portrayals_of_domestic_service_get_wrong

Advaita Vedānta Philosophy: An Introduction & Basic Reading Guide

 

Introduction [subscript diacritic dots unavailable]

Advaita Vedānta: one of the six ‘orthodox’ (from āstika, one who accepts the normative revelatory status of the Veda) schools (better: darśanas, philosophical viewpoints) of Indic philosophy that emerged in the early centuries of the Common Era. Advaita (Absolute Non-Dualism) is perhaps the best known of the sub-schools within Vedānta, which counts Viśistādvaita (Qualified Non-Dualism, or Non-Dualism of the Qualified) and Dvaita (Dualism) among the most important. Advaita Vedānta formally commences with commentaries on the Brahmasūtras (‘Holy Power Aphorisms’) (c. 300 BCE to 300 CE) of Bādārāyana (also known as Vyāsa, the ‘Arranger’). The main focus is on the relation between ātman (the soul/Self) and Brahman (the One, Ultimate Reality). In the Upanisads we find the claim that, in some sense, ātman and Brahman are ‘One,’ a claim endorsed by Śankara (8th century), the great religious philosopher whose commentaries (bhāsya) on the Brahmasūtras and the Upanisads are taken to represent the crystallization of Advaita philosophy. Mention should be made of Gaudapāda (late 5th to early 6th century), Śankara’s parama-guru (i.e., the teacher of Śankara’s master, Govinda) and author of the Māndūkya-kārikā, passages from which ‘are cited almost verbatim in Śankara’s Commentary on the Brahma-sūtra’ (Natalia Isayeva). The brilliant grammarian and philosopher of language, Bhartrhari (c. 450-510), known largely through his Vākyapadīya and its sphota theory of language, undoubtedly influenced early Vedānta philosophy, although his impact is more clearly evidenced in Kashmir Śaivism. Brahman alone is real (sat), the knowledge of which is an experiential (mystical) realization of a ‘higher’ truth qualitatively different from ordinary or conventional truth. From the vantage point of this higher truth, our perception of and belief in distinct selves and, indeed, any plurality of phenomena, or any subject/object discrimination is indicative or reflective of fundamental ignorance (avidyā) and entanglement in māyā (illusion). Until one has attained this higher truth—the goal of jñāna-yoga—it is perfectly acceptable to rely on the perception and knowledge captured in common sense or conventional descriptions of the world, as well as the applicable ethical rules, values and virtues associated with one’s obligations to and understanding of dharma (hence the acceptance of conventional epistemic criteria and standards as found in classical Indian pramāna theory). A notable Advaita exponent after Śankara, was the twelfth-century dialectician (in the manner of the Buddhist Madhyamaka school) Śriharsa. Advaita Vedānta might be described as monistic, but its monism is decidedly different from modern conceptions (wherein there is one kind of ‘something’ or stuff), for Brahman is (the ‘One without a second’), in the end, beyond predication, beyond conceptualization (a-rational, non-rational, or supra-rational), absolutely indescribable or ‘ineffable.’ It’s perhaps best characterized as a ‘neutral’ monism, and an Asian exemplification of apophatic mysticism.

Brahman is the principle of neutral monism within Advaita Vedānta, and no qualities or attributes can be predicated of Brahman, as it is beyond conceptualization. The jñāna yogi pursues a mystical awareness of that which cannot be an ‘object’ of knowledge, as Brahman transcends subject-object distinction. Brahman is ātman. Realization of Brahman is the supreme good that brings about freedom from fear and evil. The apprehension of Brahman is evocatively summarized in the formulaic expression, saccidānanda, being (sat), consciousness (cit), and bliss (ānanda). If Brahman defies all description and characterization, is beyond all predication, how can one say, for example, that ‘Brahman is truth?’ According to Eliot Deutsch, ‘To say “Brahman is truth,” negates the quality of untruth—and this negation, it is believed, serves pragmatically to orient the mind towards Brahman. All characterizations of Brahman, in short, are intended in their experiential dimension to aid those who are searching for Brahman but have not yet realized it.’ Advaita Vedānta distinguishes two modes of Brahman: nirguna and saguna. Nirguna Brahman is what we have been discussing up to this point, that transcendent indeterminate state of mystical awareness about which nothing can be affirmed (hence the via negativa or apophatic tradition of mysticism is germane). To experientially ‘know’ Brahman is to experience moksa, to be liberated from the beginningless cycles of samsāra, to nullify any further generation of karma. Until such time as we realize (nirguna) Brahman, we are perfectly fit to focus our spiritual energy and sights on saguna Brahman, that is, God with qualities, attributes, or properties. Saguna Brahman is Brahman understood by the yogi or devotee from her necessarily limited, partial, or relative perspective, in which all knowledge and understanding is qualified by ignorance. From this vantage point (saguna) Brahman is Lord, Īśvara, the proper object of our devotion and admitting of degrees of spiritual experience and understanding. Until one has the intuitive spiritual experience of non-duality, an awareness in which all distinctions, plurality, and difference are transcended and obliterated, until that is, nirvikalpa samadhi, one must acknowledge the consequences that follow entanglement in māyā (illusion) and being shadowed by avidyā (ignorance). The illusion, in other words, is for most purposes, real for us. It is an illusion created by the power (śakti) of Īśvara, the Great Magician who created the world. Māyā, in turn, has its own power, for it both conceals reality (āvarana-śakti) and misrepresents or distorts reality (viksepa-śakti). The phenomenal world as we know it (Plato’s ‘Many,’ ‘the ten thousand things’ in classical Chinese worldviews) is neither true reality (sat), nor is it fair to call it non-reality (asat) (e.g. the hare’s horn, or the square circle), rather, it has the status of ‘provisional reality’ (mithya). Another way to say this is that the world is ‘relatively true’ (vyāvahārika) for us, rather than absolutely true, or the ‘ultimate reality’ (pāramārthika).  While Īśvara knows himself as Brahman, we know Īśvara as a personal God, for ours is the vantage point of a provisional and relative reality, not (yet) that of ultimate reality.

As Ram-Prasad explains,  ‘The dense and intricate metaphysics of Advaita is built on an extraordinarily sweeping conception of consciousness.’ Indeed, the beginning of religio-philosophical and psychological inquiry in this school is found in the assumed consciousness of the individual subject*—the jīva—the sheer primitive ontological or existential presence that is both revealing and concealing: the former, owing to the fact that it is a ‘taste’ of and testament to the pure(r) and universal form of ‘witness’ consciousness (sāksin), the latter insofar as the individual’s phenomenal experience of consciousness amounts to a ‘superimposition’ (adhyāsa) on that which is truly real, a qualification or limitation of universal consciousness that arises in conjunction with ignorance. In one of the schools of thought within Advaita, a theory and metaphor of ‘reflection’ (pratibimba-vāda) is used to clarify this peculiar instantiation or embodiment of reality and appearance, for

‘the jīva is a reflection of Ātman [the Self] on the mirror of avidyā [ignorance], as such it is not-different from Ātman is essence. Just as in everyday experience where we know that the face in the mirror is not really different from the face in front of it, that the face in the mirror does not have an independent life of its own, and yet we maintain a distinction between them, so the jīva reflected in “ignorance” is not really different from its prototype, the Self, and yet it continues to be a jīva until the mirror itself is removed. The pratibimba, the reflection, is actually as real as the bimba, the prototype, being in essence the same thing; the pratibimba is misjudged to be different only because it appears to be located elsewhere than the bimba. One attains the truth of non-difference then, the moment one understands that one is a reflection of Ātman that only appears to be different from it, but is identical with it in reality.’ (Eliot Deutsch)

Intriguingly, the ‘mind (or ‘heart-mind’) as mirror metaphor’ (or the reflection of the person on a body of water) is likewise found in the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, as the sage or saint in possession of a quiescent mind is able to purely reflect the natural order of the cosmos. In chapter 10 of the former work, the question is posed: ‘In scrubbing and cleansing your profound mirror, Are you able to rid it of all imperfections?’ In both Advaita Vedanta and Daoism it appears, ‘rather than being restless, anticipating, and desiring, our minds ought to be like a clear and calm mirror capable of reflecting truth’ (Eliot Deutsch). The true nature of consciousness in Advaita is universal in scope and thus is not subject to the limiting condition(s) of individual consciousness as the basis of personal identity or the jīva. Awareness of this individual self, however, is critical and serves as the starting point and therefore is emblematic of the possibility of liberation as a locus of reflexive awareness, as it is this reflexivity which in theory and practice points to the true nature of witness-consciousness (sāksin). Ram-Prasad elaborates:

‘The self is individuated and has its own parametrically determined region of reflexive occurrence; it is then called the jīva. It is the jīva that has the “I” sense (ahamkāra). The self [as Self] is also the typical reflexivity shorn of all individuated occurrences; it is then called ātman. Then there is general consciousness, which is typically reflexive and the singular, irreducible entity [hence the ‘monist’ characterization]; it is then called brahman. A proper articulation of the Advaita position must go from highly individuated—personal and subjective—states of awareness to general features across subjects to the universal consciousness.’ (Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad)

The unliberated state is individual consciousness as experienced by the subject in a phenomenologically dualistic manner, with consciousness reaching out as it were, to both mental (intrinsic) and physical (extrinsic) objects. The pure state of universal consciousness, on the other hand, is purged of all ‘otherness,’ it is consciousness as such, sans determinate and contingent individuation or conditionality. One way to describe this is to state that it is the selfsame empirical jīva now freed of all conditions or determination, in its pure or ultimately real state as ‘transcendent’ consciousness (Ātman or Brahman). The seed-thought or intuitive spark that awakens the thirst for liberation could be said to commence with the thought or awareness that this transcendental consciousness is ever-present, veiled or obscured by the individuated consciousness tied to locus- and object-specific states. Individuation should eventually give way to de-individuation, being two sides of the same coin. Brahmānubhava, experience of Brahman, is a ‘context-free’ state of consciousness, making it difficult to intellectually comprehend how this is in fact an experience of any kind. One must account for the nature of liberation as a personal quest in a way that accounts for de-individuation as a process capable of overcoming individual will, which seems to imply that one must not become ‘attached’ to liberation, pursuing this goal in a roundabout  or indirect fashion wherein realization of the true nature of the self is attained as a by-product of spillover effect of spiritual praxis (the yogas, for example, but especially jñāna yoga), as a necessary yet not sufficient condition for Brahman-awareness.  

Reflection on the scriptural texts of Advaita Vedānta is an integral part of the spiritual praxis that serves as a necessary condition for the knowledge of Brahman. With Mīmāmsaka, another āstikadarśana, Advaita views its sacred texts as revelations or manifestations of the ‘primordial Word,’ eternal and eternally valid with regard to their statements about liberation (moksa).On this account, religious language is understood to have the capacity to precipitate a spiritual experience or awareness that is itself beyond all thought (in which case śruti, the Vedas as revelatory texts, and anubhava, the knowledge gained from experience, are inextricably intertwined) and the theoretical justification for this view draws upon Indian poetics or ‘Sanskrit criticism’ (alamkāra śāstra), including the ‘evocative’ character of poetic utterances insofar as they call to mind feelings (not, however, arousing the actual feelings embodied in the poem). As the great Kashmiri Śaiva philosopher Abhinavagupta (c. 950-1015) noted, it is the poem’s cognitive content that allows our own mental states to be objectively perceived by awakening latent memories, impressions or dispositions. The resulting rasa experience is said to be self-validating (or –certifying) (svatah prāmana, the notion that the validity of a cognitive episode or knowledge is present in the material that creates the object and that the awareness of this validity arises spontaneously with that episode or knowledge itself; for example, in Advaita Vedānta, awareness is said to be self-validating—and self-illuminating—such that the doubt ‘Am I aware or not?’ cannot occur). The self-validating character of rasa experience appears to countenance the idea that, in the end, such experience is a species of self-knowledge, in Abhinavagupta’s words, ‘a form of self-contemplation.’ The religious authority of śruti is understood as independent and self-evident, acting as a fundamental axiom of this philosophical school. Reflection and meditation on certain formulations in the Vedas can directly lead to, and are a necessary condition of, the experiential awareness of Brahman. The apparent paradox that arises with the Advaita understanding of its sacred texts (or at least certain formulations therein) is well-captured by Ram-Prasad: the sacred text is part of the world that is not ultimately real and thus the Advaita conception of liberation must explain why and how ‘the teachings of the sacred texts…are both necessarily part of primal misunderstanding and indicators of a liberation that is necessarily beyond that understanding.’

'Insource' the Shareholding of 'Outsourced' Employees

Thank goodness that Michael has now steered us back to the matter of social and economic justice, which one wishes that some of those who have been on about the HHS mandate might also concern themselves with.

Quite a bit of what I do in my 'other' life as a scholar of domestic and international economic law is try to figure out ways in which we might improve local and global economic arrangements in manners that might render them more just.  And as Michael's post reminds us, one of the principal sources of economic injustice, at least within the 'developed' world, is the way in which trade liberalization has been used to 'undo' many of the gains made by labor, through heroic struggle, in the 'developed' economies over the course of the 20th century.

A dilemma presented by trade liberalization to those of us who are concerned about this form of injustice, however, is that it has in some wahys improved the lot of many of those in the developing world who once lived in conditions far more wretched even than they are now.  How, then, to regard this - and better yet, to deal with it? 

How, that is, might we preserve and indeed intensify the justice gains being made in the developing world, withoug sacrificing such of those gains as have been made in the developed world?

I think the key lies in conditioning trade liberalization upon the gainers' - that is, the firm-owners' - sharing their gains with labor, by conveying shares in the benefitting enterprises to them. 

Here is one way we might do so, which I would love to get some of our readers' reactions to.

Many thanks and much more to come on all of this.

Reports from the economic front don't get much more sobering/disturbing than this

Take a few minutes to read Thomas Edsall's "Is This the End of Market Democracy?" in the online edition of today's NYT, here.  An excerpt, quoting MIT economist David Autor:

Overall, Autor has found that the combination of three trends — automation; the emergence of a trade-based international labor force; and the movement of jobs offshore — has polarized the job market.  There is growth at the high and low ends, but the middle collapses:

Concretely, employment and earnings are rising in both high education professional, technical and managerial occupations and, since the late 1980s, in low-education food service, personal care and protective service occupations. Conversely, job opportunities are declining in both middle-skill, white collar clerical, administrative, and sales occupations and in middle-skill, blue-collar production, craft and operative occupations. The decline in middle-skill jobs has been detrimental to the earnings and labor force participation rates of workers without a four-year college education, and differentially so for males, who are increasingly concentrated in low-paying service occupations.

In a detailed study of the effects of imports from China that compares regions where goods from China have replaced those produced locally with regions where imports did not replace local production, Autor and two colleagues found:

Rising exposure (to trade) increases unemployment, lowers labor force participation, and reduces wages in local labor markets. Conservatively, it explains one-quarter of the contemporaneous aggregate decline in U.S. manufacturing employment. Transfer benefit payments for unemployment, disability, retirement and healthcare also rise sharply in exposed labor markets. The deadweight loss of financing these transfers is one to two-thirds as large as U.S. gains from trade with China.

The debate over the workings of democracy, the market, technology and globalization remains unresolved. The political system instinctively avoids this debate, despite its salience and centrality, because the political costs of engagement are likely to substantially outweigh any potential gains. At an undetermined point in the not too distant future, however, as the “gale of creative destruction” blows through the heartland, the debate will become inescapable.

Mandates, Moral Agency, and Magisterial Messaging

It's the day of rest so I ought perhaps not to be doing this, but I simply cannot bear to see nothing new on our weblog today.  What I'd like to do, then, is just quickly to direct such of our readers as might be interested to what seems to me an engaging discussion concerning the two renditions of HHS's recent mandate.

The first entry in the discussion is a very arresting and vigorously argued article by Robert George and Sherif Girgis, titled Morals and Mandates ('MM').  This piece provides what might be the most compelling philosophical justification available for continuing skepticism, on the part of the US Catholic Bishops and others, in face of the White House's recent 're-do' of the original HHS mandate.  There then follow three interconnected entries by yours truly, each focussed on one question raised in my poor addled brain by MM.

The upshot of my provisional answers to my own interrelated queries is that MM, which argues that there is no morally substantive difference between the first and second renditions of the HHS mandate, might have overlooked something important - something which afforded very good reason for even us 'lefties' to be troubled by the first version of the mandate even as we respond more favorably to the possible shapes that a 're-do' of the mandate, of the sort broadly sketched by the White House last weekend, might take.

The 'something' in question is what I am tentatively calling an 'integrity,' or 'dignitary' interest held by religiously affiliated institutions, to which some forms of mandate can do violence while other such forms do not.  That which renders some mandates violative in this sense, I suspect, is their directly conscripting the moral agency of the institutions in question in such manner as requires those institutions to take intentional actions that 'speak' very directly to the contrary of those institutions' magisterial (i.e., moral teaching) messages.

That which distinguishes cases of such apparent conscription from less troubling demands or requirements, such as those to pay taxes that ultimately finance what is objectionable to the tax-payer, seems to be deeply linked to those 'proximity heuristics' that can be seen also at work in 'proximate causation' queries in the law of tort and in 'trolley problems' in philosophical ethics.

(It's also linked, I suspect, to what ever prompted Justice O'Connor's anti-'commandeering' concern given expression in New York v. United States, how ever peculiar I might have found that opinion when a JD student. (Since US states do not seem to me to have any normatively interesting 'messages,' 'meanings,' or other expressive/representative functions over against those of the nation)).

The 'heuristics' I mention might well be more intensional or connotative than they are extensional or denotative, hence more about meanings and intentions than about effects or material consequences.  But they are nevertheless causally efficacious and hence as materially important as they are formally important - precisely in owing to the fact that our actions in the world always give not only expression, but much additional material-consequential effect, to our 'meanings.' 

Our 'meanings,' in other words, 'matter.' 

Here are links to the pieces in question...

Morals & Mandates

Moral & Mandates: Question 1

Morals & Mandates: Question 2

Morals & Mandates: Question 3

Comments are open, all thoughts appreciated.

The Idolaters and the Iconoclasts

I am a fan of Susan Stabile’s daily reflections at Creo en Dios. See here. Today, she reviewed a book by Christopher West that I do not plan to read, but she does call attention to an interesting section involving West’s discussion of idolatry and iconoclasm: “West suggests that without a new way of seeing, we tend to lean in the direction of either “worshiping the physical world as idolaters, or rejecting the physical world as iconoclasts.” He explains

“’The full-blown idolater views sensual pleasures as man’s be-all and end-all and dives in headfirst. The full-blown iconoclast views all that is sensual with suspicion and flees into a “safe” dis-incarnate “spirituality.” The idolater seeks his comfort in “mere flesh.” The iconoclast in “mere spirit.”’

“West’s discussion of both the temptations toward, and the dangers of, imbalance in either direction is very good. I also think he is correct that, as between the two, iconoclasm can be more dangerous in the sense that it ‘more readily passes for religious “success,”’ because many people erroneously think that ‘rigorism in bodily matters equals holiness.’”

Is Contraception Always Moral?

The leaders of the Catholic Church take the position that contraception is immoral in all or virtually all circumstances. Famously, this view is not widely shared. Indeed, its position has undermined its authority with most Catholics.

In sharply disagreeing with the Catholic Church, many too easily slide to the conclusion that in a marriage the practice of contraception raises no moral issues. But there is a middle ground between the positions that contraception is always immoral or always moral. In 1930, the Lambeth Conference expressed “its strong condemnation of the use of any methods of conception control from motives of selfishness, luxury, or mere convenience.”

In the same vein, Boston College theologian  Richard Gaillardetz asked in a facebook comment the other day: "’What if’ Paul VI had adopted a more personalist approach to the issue of contraception, one that focused on the need for marital couples to be genuinely open to children in their marital relationships without focusing on each individual marital sex act? People would have understood that the Catholic tradition stands for generous, self-sacrificial love in marriage, a love that would generally include openness to children. They would have recognized that in church teaching it would be wrong to use artificial contraception for the purposes of mere convenience and in furtherance of a selfish lifestyle. * * * This approach would have condemned a ‘contraceptive mentality’ while allowing for the exercise of conscience to determine when a couple could use birth control ‘with right intention’ to exercise their obligations to responsible parenthood.”

In this connection, the 1958 Lambeth Conference expressed the belief that “the responsibility for deciding upon the number and frequency of children has been laid by God upon the consciences of parents everywhere; that this planning, in such ways as are mutually acceptable to husband and wife in Christian conscience, is a right and important factor in Christian family life and should be the result of positive choice before God. Such responsible parenthood, built on obedience to all the duties of marriage, requires a wise stewardship of the resources and abilities of the family as well as a thoughtful consideration of the varying population needs and problems of society and the claims of future generations.”

I suspect that the Catholic Church’s clinging to an unpersuasive natural law argument has played a major role in entirely removing moral reflection from marital decisions whether to use birth control. At this point, most may think this is a good thing. Not me. I think the Lambeth Conferences got it right in 1930 and 1958.

Margaret Farley lecturing at Yale on February 23, 28, & March 1

Margaret Farley to deliver Taylor Lectures on “Freedom, Obligation, and Love”

 

Margaret Farley, the Gilbert L. Stark Professor Emerita of Christian Ethics at Yale Divinity School, will deliver the 2012 Nathaniel W. Taylor Lectures on Feb. 23, 28, and March 1 on the topic “Freedom, Obligation, and Love.”  All lectures, free and open to the public, begin at 5:30 pm in Niebuhr Hall on the YDS campus, 409 Prospect St., New Haven.

 

Farley, a member of the Sisters of Mercy order of nuns, is a widely known Christian ethicist who was on the faculty of YDS from 1971 to 2007. During the course of her career, she has been a progressive theological voice in a broad range of areas including feminist theology, medical and sexual ethics, the role of women in the church, homosexuality and the church, and religious perspectives on the environment.

 

In 2008 she received the Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion for her book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (Continuum, 2006). The Grawemeyer Award is among the nation's most prestigious prizes in the field of religion and is awarded jointly by the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and the University of Louisville.

 

Deliver of Farley’s Taylor Lectures will take place as follows:

 

·      Lecture I, “Embodiment, Choice, and Action,” Thursday, February 23, 5:30 pm

·      Lecture II, “Desires, Loves, and Reasons,” Tuesday, February 28, 5:30 pm

·      Lecture III, “Morality and Self-Determination,” Thursday, March 1, 5:30 pm

 

Addressing questions of the meaning and possibility of human freedom of choice, Farley’s lectures will speak to problems raised by scientists, philosophers, and theologians. The central element will be a descriptive analysis of the experience of free choice—not the question of whether there can be free choice, but on the structure of what we choose when we choose, raising the further question of whether every choice is ultimately a choice of what and how to love.

 

The Nathaniel W. Taylor Lectureship in Theology was created in 1902 by a gift from Rebecca Taylor Hatch of Brooklyn, New York, in memory of her father, who was Dwight Professor of Didactic Theology from 1822 to 1858.

"Birth Control, Bishops and Religious Authority"

[Gary Gutting, a philosopher at Notre Dame, has this to say in the online edition of the New York Times:]

The Obama administration’s ruling requiring certain Catholic institutions like hospitals and universities to offer health insurance covering birth control prompted a furious response from the Catholic bishops.  The bishops argued that this was a violation of conscience since birth control is contrary to teachings of the Catholic Church, as expressed in Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical “Humanae Vitae.”

What interests me as a philosopher — and a Catholic — is that virtually all parties to this often acrimonious debate have assumed that the bishops are right about this, that birth control is contrary to “the teachings of the Catholic Church.” The only issue is how, if at all, the government should “respect” this teaching.

As critics repeatedly point out, 98 percent of sexually active American Catholic women practice birth control, and 78 percent of Catholics think a “good Catholic” can reject the bishops’ teaching on birth control.  The response from the church, however, has been that, regardless of what the majority of Catholics do and think, the church’s teaching is that birth control is morally wrong.  The church, in the inevitable phrase, “is not a democracy.”   What the church teaches is what the bishops (and, ultimately, the pope, as head of the bishops) say it does.

But is this true?  The answer requires some thought about the nature and basis of religious authority.  Ultimately the claim is that this authority derives from God.  But since we live in a human world in which God does not directly speak to us, we need to ask, Who decides that God has given, say, the Catholic bishops his authority?

It makes no sense to say that the bishops themselves can decide this, that we should accept their religious authority because they say God has given it to them.  If this were so, anyone proclaiming himself a religious authority would have to be recognized as one.  From where, then, in our democratic, secular society does such recognition properly come?  It could, in principle, come from some other authority, like the secular government.  But we have long given up the idea (“cujus regio, ejus religio”) that our government can legitimately designate the religious authority in its domain.  But if the government cannot determine religious authority, surely no lesser secular power could.  Theological experts could tell us what the bishops have taught over the centuries, but this does not tell us whether these teachings have divine authority.

In our democratic society the ultimate arbiter of religious authority is the conscience of the individual believer. It follows that there is no alternative to accepting the members of a religious group as themselves the only legitimate source of the decision to accept their leaders as authorized by God.  They may be wrong, but their judgment is answerable to no one but God.  In this sense, even the Catholic Church is a democracy.

But, even so, haven’t the members of the Catholic Church recognized their bishops as having full and sole authority to determine the teachings of the Church?  By no means.  There was, perhaps, a time when the vast majority of Catholics accepted the bishops as having an absolute right to define theological and ethical doctrines.  Those days, if they ever existed, are long gone.  Most Catholics — meaning, to be more precise, people who were raised Catholic or converted as adults and continue to take church teachings and practices seriously — now reserve the right to reject doctrines insisted on by their bishops and to interpret in their own way the doctrines that they do accept.  This is above all true in matters of sexual morality, especially birth control, where the majority of Catholics have concluded that the teachings of the bishops do not apply to them.  Such “reservations” are an essential constraint on the authority of the bishops.

The bishops and the minority of Catholics who support their full authority have tried to marginalize Catholics who do not accept the bishops as absolute arbiters of doctrine.  They speak of “cafeteria Catholics” or merely “cultural Catholics,” and imply that the only “real Catholics” are those who accept their teachings entirely.  But this marginalization begs the question I’m raising about the proper source of the judgment that the bishops have divine authority.  Since, as I’ve argued, members of the church are themselves this source, it is not for the bishops but for the faithful to decide the nature and extent of episcopal authority.  The bishops truly are, as they so often say, “servants of the servants of the Lord.”

It may be objected that, regardless of what individual Catholics think, the bishops in fact exercise effective control over the church.  This is true in many respects, but only to the extent that members of the church accept their authority.  Stalin’s alleged query about papal authority (“How many divisions does the Pope have?”) expresses more than just cynical realpolitik.  The authority of the Catholic bishops is enforceable morally but not militarily or politically.  It resides entirely in the fact that people freely accept it.

The mistake of the Obama administration — and of almost everyone debating its decision — was to accept the bishops’ claim that their position on birth control expresses an authoritative “teaching of the church.”  (Of course, the administration may be right in thinking that the bishops need placating because they can cause them considerable political trouble.)  The bishops’ claim to authority in this matter has been undermined because Catholics have decisively rejected it. The immorality of birth control is no longer a teaching of the Catholic Church.  Pope Paul VI meant his 1968 encyclical, “Humanae Vitae,” to settle the issue in the manner of the famous tag, “Roma locuta est, causa finita est.”  In fact the issue has been settled by the voice of the Catholic people.

Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes? Part II

In appreciation for Michael's post below, I want to add a bit of biblical back-up for that great theologian Chico Marx!

This week we read at Morning Prayer John 9, the story of the man born blind. It is, in many ways, the classic text for an empirical theological mode. While fear of losing power (the Pharisees in the story), or fear of being thrown out of the synagogue (the blind man's parents) prevent  those around him from seeing what is right before their eyes, the newly cured blind man expresses his incredulity at their (newly acquired) blindness: "The man answered, ‘Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, and yet he opened my eyes!'

This, it seems to me, is one place to start in distinguishing what I would call the tradition of 'religious left' theology, the kind of progressive theology that we see in Reinhold Niebuhr earlier in the 20th century, or in Rowan Williams' more recent work on a theology of sexuality. The abstract deployment of scriptural texts, or the convoluted turns of some natural theology arguments are simply no match for the eye-opening witness of healing, grace and love that so many have seen in same-sex couples in our parishes, and for the blessings of prudent, non-exploitative family planning.

Unless one employs a blindingly rationalistic theory of the 'noetic effects of sin' such that we can't trust our own eyes, the catholic faithful, as Michael's post gives evidence of, have seen far more of the truth of things than some in power (and in fear of losing that power) can imagine.

In listening to  the remarkable words of Maureen Walsh, the conservative Republican from Walla Walla, as she speaks of her passionate love for her lesbian daughter, I for one hear the deepest meaning of what the First Amendment calls the free exercise of religion. Free from fear, free to rejoice in the blessings that come as gifts to us,  right before our very eyes. 

"Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?"

--Chico Marx, Duck Soup.

Check this out, including the video:  "A Widow's Wisdom".

An excerpt:

"SEATTLE – Every once in a while the unconvincing, bristly language of the culture wars gives way to a genuine plea from the heart. And it’s in these rare moments, when words are freed from their ideological captors, that the politics of these issues are shown to be so hollow.

We had one of these public cris de coeur here in the remarkable run-up to Washington’s legalizing same-sex marriage this week. A middle-aged, heterosexual legislator, Maureen Walsh, who is a conservative Republican from the small town of Walla Walla, rose to explain why she would be bucking her party on one of the most contentious social issues of the day. . . ."

By the way, there is some interesting polling data in this morning's NYT:

"Gay marriage is another debate in which the Catholic laity disagrees with church doctrine. More than two-thirds of Catholic voters supported some sort of legal recognition of gay couples’ relationships: 44 percent favored marriage, and 25 percent preferred civil unions. Twenty-four percent said gay couples should receive no legal recognition.

Again, white evangelical Christian voters expressed more conservative views. A majority said there should not be legal recognition of a gay relationship, while 18 percent said they should be allowed to marry and 25 percent supported civil unions.

The nationwide telephone poll included 1,064 registered voters, of whom 226 were Catholic and 238 were white evangelical Christians. The margins of sampling error are plus or minus three percentage points for all voters, plus or minus seven points for Catholics, and plus or minus six points for white evangelical Christians."

Entire article here.

 

Legal Personhood for “Autonomous Artificial Agents”

I wanted to alert our readers to an intriguing online symposium that has begun today* at Concurring Opinions (although the announced schedule was February 14—16) on Samir Chopra and Laurence F. White’s book, A Legal Theory for Autonomous Artificial Agents (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011). I’ve yet to read the book (it’s on order). In the announcement to the symposium I made a few preliminary comments (as did the other longstanding CO commenter, A.J. Sutter), to the last of which Professor Chopra responded as follows:

“Patrick: I think there might be one fundamental point of disagreement between us might be my refusal to consider human intentionality and morality some sort of singularity in the natural order, the attainment of which lies entirely beyond non-carbon based entities.” [….]

This is indeed a fundamental point of disagreement. I’m considerably more than a wee bit concerned when concepts and categories intrinsic to morality, ontology (if not metaphysics), and psychology (consciousness, intentionality, autonomy, moral agency, and so on) are taken from the domain of the human (and, to a limited extent, nonhuman) animal world and applied to the realm of “artificial intelligence” (AI) technology. In other words, their natural domain of application (pun intended) does, in fact, rule out both literal and metaphorical extension into the realm of “non-carbon based entities.”

Without going into the details or possible arguments, we might find it tempting or at least easier to extend our moral and psychological concepts and categories beyond the human and nonhuman animal world into the domain of AI technology if our understanding of the mind (including consciousness and intentionality) is beholden to metaphors, models, or pictures that are currently fashionable in some quarters of philosophy, cognitive science, and psychology. One such model comes courtesy of “cognitive naturalism,” an “interdisciplinary amalgam of psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and linguistics,” the central hypothesis of which is “that thought can be understood in terms of computational procedures on mental representations,” dubbed by the philosopher Paul Thagard as CRUM, for Computational-Representational Understanding of Mind. On this model, mental representations are like (or virtually identical to) data structures and the mind’s putative “computational procedures” are algorithms, and thus “thinking” is tantamount to running programs. The current and fairly uncritical fascination with the neurosciences, evolutionary psychology, and reductionist theories in philosophy of mind contribute to an intellectual climate and disciplinary inquiries that directly or implicitly sanction or legitimate the legal endeavor to ascribe moral autonomy and ethical agency to technological programs and devices like robots.

I’m not claiming that these new technologies don’t raise novel moral and legal problems for which we may need to craft a fairly new conceptual (including legal) vocabulary. But such an enterprise would necessarily eschew simply importing existing moral and psychological principles, predicates, and concepts (as presuppositions, assumptions, or axioms) into the world of technology and law. And such an enterprise will have to avoid, at the very least, the siren call of mind-brain reductionism. In other words, consciousness, intentionality, and normativity decisive (i.e. basic or fundamental) properties or features or characteristics of our mental life which rule out the plausibility of reductionist or eliminativist “hypotheses.” (In Daniel Robinson’s words: ‘It cannot even be said that they are working hypotheses, because a working hypothesis is one that will rise or fall on the basis of relevant evidence, and there is no “evidence” as such that could tell for or against “hypotheses” of this sort.’) 

I hope to write more on this topic in the near future.

* There is now another post up by James Grimmelmann: here.

Further Reading:

• Bennett, M.R. and P.M.S. Hacker. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.
• Bennett, Maxwell, Daniel Dennett, Peter Hacker, John Searle, and Daniel Robinson. Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind and Language. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
• Borgmann, Albert. Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
• Buller, David J. Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
• Descombes, Vincent (Stephen Adam Schwartz, tr.). The Mind’s Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
• Dupré, John. Human Nature and the Limits of Science. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2001.
• Feenberg, Andrew. Questioning Technology. New York: Routledge, 1999.
• Finkelstein, David H. Expression and the Inner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
• Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.
• Horst, Steven. Beyond Reduction: Philosophy of Mind and Post-Reductionist Philosophy of Science. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Hutto, Daniel D. The Presence of Mind. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999.
• Hutto, Daniel D. Beyond Physicalism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000.
• Hutto, Daniel D. Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
• Ihde, Don. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990.
• Midgley, Mary. Science and Poetry. London: Routledge, 2001.
• Pardo, Michael S. and Dennis Patterson, “Minds, Brains, and Norms” (July 10, 2009). Neuroethics. Forthcoming. University of Alabama Public Law Research Paper. Available: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1432476 .
• Pardo, Michael S. and Dennis Patterson. “Philosophical Foundations of Law and Neuroscience” (February 6, 2009). University of Illinois Law Review, 2010. University of Alabama Public Law Research Paper No. 1338763. Available: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1338763 .
• Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
• Putnam, Hilary. Realism with a Human Face. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
• Putnam, Hilary. The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
• Rescher, Nicholas. The Limits of Science. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984.
• Rescher, Nicholas. Nature and Understanding: The Metaphysics and Method of Science. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2000.
• Robinson, Daniel N. Consciousness and Mental Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
• Tallis, Raymond. The Explicit Animal: A Defence of Human Consciousness. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999 ed.
• Tallis, Raymond. The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003.
• Tallis, Raymond. I Am: A Philosophical Inquiry into First-Person Being. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
• Tallis, Raymond. The Knowing Animal: A Philosophical Inquiry into Knowledge and Truth. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.  
• Tallis, Raymond. Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. Durham, England: Acumen, 2011.
• Thagard, Paul. Mind: Introduction to Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
• Travis, Charles. Unshadowed Thought: Representation in Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
• Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005 ed.
• Velmans, Max. Understanding Consciousness. London: Routledge, 2000.
• Wedgwood, Ralph. The Nature of Normativity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
• Ziman, John. Real Science: What It Is, and What It Means. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.  

The Bishops' Response to the Obama Revision

In partial response to Bob's question, According to the Bishops, "It [the Obama revision] would allow non-profit, religious employers to declare that they do not offer such coverage. But the employee and insurer may separately agree to add that coverage. The employee would not have to pay any additional amount to obtain this coverage, and the coverage would be provided as a part of the employer's policy, not as a separate rider."
The Bishops apparently are objecting that the contraception insurance is not a separate rider."See http://usccb.org/news/2012/12-026.cfm
Even assuming the Bishops are correct in their characterization, this objection seems excessively precious to me. It seems to exalt form over substance. I do not see how this distinction gives rise to a morally serious objection involving religious freedom.

On the other hand, I do not believe the Obama revision applies to private for profit employers with religious objections. Although I recognize that by subscribing to the Taco Bell example, I will be thought by most people to have walked into outer darkness, I think it appropriate to honor those objections, if, but only if, there is no economic incentive for employers to make the objection. An employer (including religious hospitals and universities) should not economically benefit from a religious exemption. As I have previously argued, see here, the employers should be required to increase employees' wages by the amount the employers save because of a religious exemption. (With the possible exception of a very closely held business corporation, I would not expect that business corporations would have consciences to invoke).

The Bishops are concerned about self-insuring employers with religious objections and religious insurance companies. With respect to the former, I wonder how many of these are individuals who have consciences and how many are business corporations that as artificial entities who do not. If they are individuals with a good faith objection, I would compel them to increase wages by the amount they would save from a First Amendment exemption and have the government provide social insurance. 

As to the latter, I would like to know about religious insurance companies. I have not heard of them. My tendency is to think that business corporations have no free exercise rights, but if there is an unincorporated insurance company run by a private person, I would balance the free exercise interest against the government interest, and the possibility of alternatives. But I think more facts are needed here to analyze the factors.

I conclude by noting again the irony that amidst the internet explosion surrounding Obama's insensitivity to free exercise interests that little attention has been paid to the fact that the award for constitutional insensitivity to religious freedom still belongs not to President Obama, but to the conservative's favorite justice: Antonin Scalia. 

 

 

More on the HHS Mandate 'Walk Back'

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops is apparently unsatisfied with the HHS's 'walkback' from the contraception coverage mandate announced Friday.  Rick Garnett and Robby George at Mirror have posted a link to a letter that they have composed which explains why.

Absent further information on the revised mandate itself, I find it difficult to know what to make of the letter, and hope that someone might supply the necessary information.  Here is what I mean: 

For present purposes, one can envisage two distinct scenarios that the revised HHS mandate might, well, mandate.  (If there are alternatives that I ought to be considering, do please somebody let me know.)  

Per one such scenario, a religiously affiliated employer is required, like all other employers under the ACA, to purchase one health insurance policy covering all of its employees, which policy covers contraceptive pharmaceuticals and devices.  The employer is then 'accommodated' (which term I believe stems from the Surpeme Court's Amish-defending Wisconsin v. Yoder decision of 1973, right?) by not being required to inform its employees of the latter coverage, that role being assigned to the insurance company.

Per the other such scenario that I envisage, the religiously affiliated employer is accommodated a la Yoder by being required, unlike other employers, to purchase a policy for its employees that need not cover contraceptives, while the insurance company is then separately required to provide to the same group of employees a second policy that does cover contraceptives. 

The first scenario, which the present wording of the aforementioned letter appears to me to suggest is the actual scenario with which Friday's White House announcement presents us, would seem pretty clearly to warrant the damning language employed by the letter, if not indeed worse.  For it then would amount not even to anything so exhalted as an 'accounting gimmick,' as the letter characterizes it, but instead to a mere 'speak no evil ['evil' being defined by the institution]' allowance. 

One can imagine variants of the second scenario, by contrast, that might well not warrant such criticism as that offered by the letter, at least not absent an account of what sorts of accounting arrangement constitute mere gimmickry devoid of moral substance (to repeat more language employed in the letter) and what sorts do not.

(I have, for example, since well before the Supreme Court effectively constitutionalized the argument, often defended flows of education and health grant funds from the public fisc to religiously affiliated schools, hospitals, and other social service organizations as consistent with non-establishment, on the ground that, accounting-wise, they amounted to equal pro rata shares provided for the benefit of the clients of these institutions, which equality rendered the clients' choices 'intervening' choices of precisely the sort that 'cleanse' government funds of 'endorsement' significance.)  

I wonder, then, whether anyone might clarify (a) whether the revised mandate mandates some such scenario as the first I described rather than the second, and (b) where one might find detailed verification of this if indeed it does?  If, instead, the revised mandate mandates some variant of the second scenario that I described, I wonder whether someone might clarify (c) what the particulars of the variant are, (d) where one might find those, and (e) whether any variant on this second scenario would be permissible? 

I pose the last query - (e) - partly because, if the answer is no, I might have to abandon an argument that I quite often employ in defense, against what I currently believe to be spurious 'establishment' charges, of public funds' being directed to religiously affiliated schools, hospitals, and other social service agencies.

I pose the full set of queries - (a) through (e) - because I wish both to come to an informed judgment of the HHS mandate, and to ensure that I hold a coherent general account of how we as a nation might maintain our eclectic amalgam of mixed public-private social insurance and safety net provision on the one hand, without running aground on the Scylla of establishment or the Charybidis of curtailed free exercise on the other hand. 

(Apropos this latter point, by the way, it is tempting once more to suggest that direct public provision of health insurance might solve the conundrum where health care is concerned much as does public provision of education, pension insurance, and unemployment insurance funding where those public goods are concerned.)  

Comments are open.  Many thanks.  

(Cross-posted at Mirror of Justice)

Update on the 'Walk Back'

Here is the White House press release on today's 'walkback' on the HHS mandate: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/02/10/fact-sheet-women-s-preventive-services-and-religious-institutions . It is gratifying to see that the onus is being placed upon insurers, as Tom Berg at Mirror and I have hoped aloud since Wednesday. Still to be awaited, though, is the guideline concerning how religiously affiliated institutions are to make their employees aware of the continued availability, free of charge, of contraception coverage from their insurers. Stay tuned.

White House to 'Walk Back' the HHS Mandate Today

Those readers who have been following the back-and-forth over the HHS mandate in recent days will be interested to learn that the White House plans today to announce a revision, at about 12.15pm EST.

More on this news can be read here: http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/10/politics/contraception-controversy/index.html?hpt=hp_t2 .  (Incidentally, the observations made in this story about an apparent division within the White House and Democratic Caucus over the original HHS mandate are fascinating, in that it seems that Vice President Biden, Senator Kerry, former Chief of Staff Daley, and quite a few other progressive Democrats warned against the current version, while HHS Secretary Sebelius (herself a progressive Catholic) and others were equally adament in favor.  This matter that has so rent the Church since the 1960s, in short, seems to have rent its best known government functionaries as well.  Perhaps all the more reason, that, for the government to do its level best to leave this one alone.)

A key question that looms now in connection with the expected revision is whether it will sufficiently address the specific conscience concern that the HHS mandate as it currently stands has implicated.  Much, if not all, one suspects, will hinge upon how specific or direct the new mandate will require the advice given by religiously affiliated employers to their employees, as to what they should do given that the institutions' group insurance policies do not cover contraception, to be.

My own surmise and hope, for what they might be worth, are that some formulation such as that which I offered here on Wednesday should satisfy all.  Similarly, I believe that Steve's proposal made here yesterday should satisfy all. 

I harbor some marginal worry at the moment, however, that the compromise actually announced in about one hour's time might turn out to amount to a case of our graceful President's 'stepping into it' twice.  For current reports hint that the requirement might be that religiously affiliated employers provide quite specific instruction to their employees as to how and where they may procure contraception coverage.  Something along those lines seems apt to implicate the same penumbral first amendment concerns as does the mandate as presently found. 

I am very much hoping, then, both for the sake of first amendment values and, just as much, for the sake of justice in the distribution of health risk nationwide, that the White House gets it spot on this time, that we might finally put this altogether needless distraction behind us quite quickly - as far before November as possible.

A Solution to the Contraception Insurance Issue

The administration has signaled that it is looking for a compromise to the contraception insurance issue. How about this? Those employers who conscientiously oppose providing contraception insurance to their employees should not be able to profit from a religious exemption. Accordingly, the employers should be required to increase employees' wages by the amount the employers save because of a religious exemption.

The employer might not want to pay higher wages, but could have no serious religious objection to the requirement. Employees could use the money to purchase insurance for contraception if they wished or for other purposes at their option.

From the perspective of the administration, this proposal has a disadvantage. A major reason for requiring employers to include contraception as a part of their insurance was to encourage greater use of preventative services by employees. One way to mitigate this disadvantage would be to afford a tax deduction for the premiums required to purchase contraception insurance. The fringe benefit of insurance was not taxable in the first place. Indeed, from the perspective of the administration, it would make sense to make all contraception expenses tax deductible or, alternatively, even a tax credit. If the evidence showed that tax policy of this character would increase contraception, we could expect abortions to decline in turn. Of course, the Catholic Church would oppose any such tax policy on moral grounds, but it could not argue that the policy would violate its religious freedom.

 

 

 

 

 

WA Marriage Equality Bill Passes with Some Republican Support

The bill which would allow gay marriage in the State of Washington received support from Republicans in both houses. Maureen Walsh (R) from Walla Walla, in the southeastern part of the state, made a particularly passionate plea for bipartisan support that can be viewed here...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRmw1Su21iw

The bill is expected to be signed by the governor on Monday. However, it will not become effective unless and until it receives voter support in a planned referendum and initiative intended to prevent the bill from becoming law (presuming they qualify for the upcoming November ballot).

John Boehner, Justice Scalia, and Contraception Insurance

John Boehner is arguing that the government’s policy requiring religious hospitals and universities to include contraception coverage in their insurance violates the First Amendment. This is plainly wrong. The government’s policy covers all hospitals and universities, not just religious hospitals and universities. Accordingly, the policy is part of a generally applicable statute that happens to hit religion. According to the Court, the refusal to create an exemption is not a constitutional violation.

In my view, however, it should be unconstitutional. The chief constitutional culprit is Justice Scalia. He wrote the opinion providing thick constitutional cover for Obama’s contraception policy. Perhaps the Republicans will get together and hang their favorite justice in effigy for failing to respect religious freedom. Don’t hold your breath.

The End of Art

My assertion at one point that Warhol was closest to a philosophical genius of any twentieth-century artist very nearly cost me Robert[] [Motherwell’s] friendship, and he pointed out to me that Warhol rarely said more in front of a painting than ‘Wow.’ But that of course is just my point: the philosophy was in and through the work, and not in what was said in front of the work. There is in my view a great deal in Hegel’s belief that art and philosophy are deeply affined—that they are, in his heavy idiom, two moments of Absolute Spirit. The wonder of Warhol is that he did philosophy as art, in the sense that he defined false boundaries by crossing them. Since no philosopher of art in 1964 recognized the kind of problems Warhol raised, he could not have had a philosophical language in which to explain it. So, perhaps, ‘Wow.’  [….] Since at least Warhol’s exhibition of Brillo (and other) cartons at the Stable Gallery on East 74th Street in Manhattan in the spring of 1964, I have felt him to possess a philosophical intelligence of an intoxicatingly high order. He could not touch anything without at the same time touching the very boundaries of thought, at the very least thought about art. [….] Indeed, I believe it was among Warhol’s chief contributions to the history of art that he brought artistic practice to a level of philosophical self-consciousness never before attained.—Arthur C. Danto

For Warhol all art is commercial, which says more about the power of commerce than it does about the power of art. It took little more than half a century to undo Kandinsky’s idea that art was the last bastion of spirituality against materialism. [….] The artist was once thought of as sacred—he had a spark of God’s creativity in him—but Warhol’s artist is a businessman, profaning everything sacred and creative by putting a price on it, as Marx said. [….] Warhol’s art exploits the aura of glamor that surrounds material and social success, ignoring its existential costs. His art lacks existential depth; it is a social system with no existential resonance. ‘If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface: of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.’ This consumate statesman of postmodern nihilism suggests the reason that art has lost faith in itself: it has lost emotional and existential depth, and sees no reason to have any. [....] Some interpreters have thought Warhol was deliberately cynical, or at least ironical, but I think his seductive equation of money and art—not to say permanent confusion of their terms—was dead serious and honest. It is ruthlessly cool, in a world where ‘coolness’ is the aesthetic…. Cool is the way to be both indifferent to commerce and commercial at the same time.—Donald Kuspit

The following is a synoptic introduction to Donald Kuspit’s The End of Art (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

This book provides a brilliant and devastating diagnosis of what ails post-aesthetic or postmodern art: its failure to facilitate an aesthetic contemplative alternative to the “ugliness and injustice” of our social world (failing to realize that beauty is the ‘ultimate protest’ against ugliness); its constitutional inability to provide a “psychic space” that permits or encourages autonomy (wherein the ethical is inherent in aesthetics and beauty); its penchant for the tragicomic or farcical wherein the work of art, constructed by the would-be celebrity-artist, is merely a “psychosocial construction defined by its institutional identity, entertainment value, and commercial panache.”

Kuspit defines the “post-aesthetic” character of art as having abandoned the “heroic idea of the human potential of aesthetic experience,” which includes the “further[ing] [of] personal autonomy and critical freedom.” Postmodern “art” has become “consummately commercial,” causing the artist, the public, the patron and even the connoisseur to confuse or conflate commercial values with the spiritual values of art: “When commodity identity overtakes and subsumes aesthetic identity, so that an expensive work is uncritically accorded aesthetic significance, not to say spiritual value—they become everyday artifacts.” Postmodern art’s commercial value is linked to its role as entertainment: for the wealthy, who can afford its products, and the hoi polloi, whose consumption is passive, collective witness to the commercial spectacle and permitted vicarious association with the rich and famous aesthetes by way of “the  museum,” an institution that serves as “an intellectual sarcophagus, as much as a physical museum.” Postmodern artists hanker after “an audience that will make them popular, giving them the celebrity and charisma they believe they are entitled to as artists.” Kuspit dares his readers to show him “the contemporary artist who would prefer to live from hand to mouth rather than fall into the hands of an art dealer.”

Kuspit laments “protest art” and art that is ostensibly “moral,” enlisting art in the service of “meliorative criticism and social advocacy” because it tends to “regard[] form as a kind of scaffolding for subject matter from which it can be proclaimed,” and “the artist tries to bully the spectator into believing what the artist believes,” all the while leaving matter more or less “aesthetically untransformed” and evidencing a “certain failure of creativity.” Protest artists (producers of what others call ‘agitprop’),

“fail to realize that beauty is the ultimate protest against ugliness, which why the absence of beauty in their works shows that they are not critical. They are in fact creative failures. Indeed, the inability to imagine beauty is a sign of the creative inadequacy of post-aesthetic art.”

By contrast, “traditional art reveals the qualities—dignity and empathy especially—that make us human. It is morally concerned, and often shows the moral siege in an immoral world.”

Kuspit’s stinging lament does not end in despair:

“The anti-aesthete, anti-imaginative, anti-unconscious seem to have destroyed the possibility of making an aesthetic masterpiece, but there are still artists who believe in the imaginative refinement, under the auspices of the unconscious, of raw social and physical material into aesthetically transcendent art.”

First Image: By Avigdor Arikha who, together with Lucian Freud, Kuspit christens “Deans of the New Old Master artists.” Second Image: Brillo Soap Pads Box, 1964 (silkscreen on polymer paint on wood) The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh Founding Collection.

How HHS Might Helpfully 'Walk it Back'

Tom Berg has an encouraging post up at Mirror today which I encourage all to examine: http://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2012/02/the-beginning-of-a-walk-back-on-the-contraception-mandate.html . 

I think that Tom's notice of an incipient 'walk back' on the part of HHS is provisionally very good news both for the cause of free exercise and association, and for the cause of socio-economic justice consistent therewith.  (As Tom notes, when Chris Matthews - and, we might add, E.J. Dionne and countless other similarly situated folk - gasp aloud at the clumsiness of a putatively graceful Democratic President, that President has assuredly mis-stepped.)

One possibility under consideration is to adopt a model of exemption similar to one used in Hawaii.  This would allow religiously affiliated institutions to refrain from covering objectionable devices or procedures, require insurers to permit employees of such institutions to purchase the excluded coverage on their own at the same pro rata rates, and require the religiously affiliated institutions to instruct the individuals how to go about procuring those still equally affordable devices or procedures.  

I think the first two parts of this proposed solution altogether well advised.  I would register one provisional objection, however, to that third piece of the Hawaiian model of accommodation.  To my thinking, a state-imposed requirement that religiously affiliated institutions provide detailed instructions on how to procure that which the religious communities themselves see as wrongful is both profoundly demeaning of those religious communities and their adherents, and ominously close to first-amendment-violative forced speech or commandeering.  

I accordingly find Tom's suggested reformulation of this provision, over at MOJ, much to be preferred.  Per his suggestion, the religiously affiliated institutions would simply advise individuals of the devices and procedures not covered by the institutions themselves, and let them know that they can find out further details by contacting the insurers. 

I would perhaps even do Tom one further in the direction of generality by adopting some such language as this:

Because we are a(n) [Name of Ecclesial Affiliation] institution, there are some devices and procedures offered by some medical providers for which we are not able, in clear conscience, to subsidize insurance coverage.  For further information please consult your insurance provider.

Let me also note here in passing, if I may, that were the U.S. to adopt a single-payer mode of insuring health as do all of our peer nations, we would not only enjoy a much more just and efficient spread of health risk over our population, but also would not be faced with the many Ptolemaic contortions we can expect in the years ahead, of which the present conundrum is doubtless but one early instance.  (Even given that the 2010 reforms are preferable to what went before, as I maintain they are.)  

It is only fitting, I suppose, that a putatively 'progressive' President who alienated scores of millions of his supporters by taking 'single payer' 'off of the table' in the 2009-2010 health insurance reform efforts now finds himself alienating many of those same supporters a second time, along with other 'moderates' and 'conservatives,' as his HHS collides with first amendment values in trying to make a social insurance program of what remains for the most part a privately provided such 'program.'

 

(Cross-posted at Mirror of Justice)

The Law and Presidential Politics of Forced Contraception Insurance

Much of the discussion about forcing some religious institutions to provide insurance for contraception to employees makes little sense to me. It seems to be a clear burden on free exercise. Few apparently think that the Catholic Church itself needs to provide insurance for contraception to its employees. The distinction is purported to be that unlike the Catholic Church, Catholic hospitals hire non-Catholics and those hospitals should not be able to force their moral views on to their employees. Aside from the fact that the Catholic Church probably hires some non-Catholics, this blinks the obvious point that Catholics use contraceptive methods as well. Indeed, the disagreement by Catholics with the Church’s teachings on this subject is so widespread that the rate of contraceptive use by Catholics is quite high. Even more important, it is doubtful that the failure of insurance to include contraception  would put a dent in contraception. In short, hospitals would not be forcing their moral views on their employees.

Nonetheless, this is the ACLU line. See here.  I suspect this line is influenced by the view that the Catholic view on contraception is as crazy as I think it is. But I do not understand how the ACLU can defend odious Nazis and merchants of addiction, death, and suffering (i.e., the tobacco companies), but let their right thinking stance on contraception cloud judgment on free exercise.

Finally, I do not get the politics of this. Last Friday Peggy Noonan argued that while we were all busy discussing the gaffes of Mitt Romney (she thought he should have rescued himself by talking seriously about poverty), Obama had needlessly signed off on this contraception policy and that will cost him the election. It is true that Obama has been widely criticized for this by the hierarchy and by Catholics across the political spectrum.  The Catholic voters, however, are divided. 52% of Catholic voters oppose this decision and 45% support it. See here. But it is not clear that this issue will be decisive for anyone’s thinking come November. Nonetheless, it will not help Obama with the Catholic vote. Perhaps it was thought necessary to shore up a different part of the base. I do not know. It would be interesting to hear an inside account of the political discussion that lay behind this decision. And it is an election year. They did not forget to have a political discussion.

9th Circuit Affirms Unconstitutionality of CA Proposition 8

Today, the 9th Circuit affirmed the District Court's finding that California's Proposition 8, overturning gay marriage in that state, is unconstitutional. We will be seeing more on this case. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204136404577209183209519256.html

Gandhi and the Gītā

Owing to its length, and the fact that I thought it might receive greater attention from our readers, I’m posting my reply to Bob Hockett’s important question to the post immediately below.

One might, with Margaret Chatterjee, rightly characterize Gandhi’s interpretation of the Gītā as “unorthodox,” and it was indeed at least with regard to the story as a whole insofar as he viewed its historico-mythic setting in an allegorical fashion (some have referred to it as wholly ‘spiritualized’). It was an interpretation largely shared later by no less than Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. This may not be surprising for several reasons, one of which being the eclectic and strongly individual nature of his spirituality generally but perhaps more importantly, his insistence that the interpretation of religious texts should be based on one’s own experience and in the light of one’s own reason (‘the result of prayerful study and experience’), in this case, virtually free from the moorings of traditional interpretation (and this went beyond the differences between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ interpretations in Hinduism) and in keeping with the criteria he outlined for “justified faith.” In addition, and accordingly, Gandhi felt free to reject anything he found “inconsistent with the first principles of morality,” including “any conduct contrary to truth and ahimsā.” Gandhi’s knowledge (in the intellectual and philosophical sense) of “his” religious roots came fairly late, exemplified by the fact that he discovered the Gītā in an English translation by Sir Edwin Arnold, which had gained popularity in Theosophical circles, and in fact it was two Theosophists who gave the book to him (yet he did not begin a close study of the text until 1903, about ten years later). Gandhi may indeed have been strongly influenced by a Theosophical reading of the text, most likely that of T. Subba Row (July 6, 1856-June 24, 1890).

Gandhi’s intepretation is not implausible, and an allegorical reading of religious and philosophical works is not uncommon, in this instance especially if one views the larger epic itself, the Mahābhārata (the longest epic poem ever written, the Gītā being but a small portion of the text), as allegorical:

“The Mahabharata is not to me a historical record. It is hopeless as a history. But it deals with eternal verities in an allegorical fashion. It takes up historical personages and events and transforms them into angels or devils as it suits the purpose of the poet whose theme is the eternal dual between good and evil, spirit and matter, god and satan.”

As J.T.F. Jordens has explained, heretofore Gandhi “had argued that the author of the Gita only used the battle as an ‘occasion’ for its teaching, and that he used it in such a way because he did not look upon war as morally wrong” [there is, after all, something like a ‘just war’ conception in Hinduism]. Incarceration in Yeravda jail in 1922 gave Gandhi time to read the entire epic, whereupon he now argued that the Mahābhārata, in Jordens’ words, was itself

“against war because it described the utter futility of a pyrrhic victory in which both victors and vanquished lose their all. Henceforth Gandhi’s main argument for holding that the Gita was a treatise on non-violence was the assertion that it constituted a central episode in the great anti-war epic.”

The plausibility of such an interpretation was acknowledged in our own time by one of the foremost philosophers of Indic philosophy, Bimal Krishna Matilal (1935-1991): “the Gītā can, paradoxically, be treated as a text that discourages violence or bloody battles. It may also show the futility of all such battles.”

I hope to discuss the Bhagavad Gītā at length in a future post in response to something written online by Namit Arora that should further touch upon some of these issues.

The Three Yogas of the Bhagavad Gītā: An Introduction

In our introductory post on yoga, which focused on Patañjali’s Yoga system, I promised to introduce the three principal forms of yoga as discussed in the Bhagavad Gītā. The following therefore attempts to make sense of the Gītā’s discussion of bhakti-yoga, karma-yoga, and jñāna-yoga. It is certainly is possible and perhaps best to practice all three yogas, although in keeping with the karmic and psychological consequences of “guna” theory (see below for the meaning of this concept), an individual will be inclined to elevate one of the three yogas over the others in his or her life owing to a particular psycho-physiological temperament or character type in which one of the three gunas predominate. [subscript diacritic dots missing]

Bhagavad Gītā: ‘Song of the Lord’—a spiritual and philosophical story in verse consisting of a dialogue between Krsna, as an incarnation of Visnu, and Arjuna, the brave warrior who was the offspring of Pāndu’s wife, Kuntī, and the god Indra (the gods, at Pāndu’s request, having sired his five sons with his two wives). Krsna appears as Arjuna’s charioteer just prior to the start of the great Bhārata war to counsel the courageous warrior who is having second (and last minute) thoughts about participating in a battle in which the two sides are closely related to each other, and which is certain to result in enormous carnage for both parties. The Gītā is but a comparatively small section of the epic Mahābhārata (‘the great [war of] the Bhāratas’). Commentaries on the Gītā have been penned some famous Indian philosophers, including Śankara, Rāmānuja, and Madhva in the Vedānta tradition, and Abhinavagupta in the Kashmir Śaiva tradition. Gandhi left us with a Gujarati translation and commentary (trans. into English by Mahadev Desai) of the work he called his ‘dictionary of daily reference.’ Among the topics covered in the Bhagavad Gītā we find dharma (including svadharma), karma, reincarnation, the immortality of the soul, yajña (sacrifice), vairāgya (free from attachment or detachment), anāsakti (selfless action), dama (self restraint), samnyāsa (renunciation), bhakti (love and devotion to God), and the various paths (mārgas) to liberation (moksa): bhakti-, karma-, and jñāna-yoga.

bhakti-yoga (or mārga): the yoga or path of love and devotion; devotional worship, including pūjā, to one’s personal deity. Bhakti is the most popular and accessible religious practice among Hindus, although the likes of Rāmānuja and Madhva have accorded it theological and philosophical authority and respectability. In addition to pūjā, devotional singing and dancing, as well as pilgrimages to holy places, are conspicuous expressions of this spirituality. An inner surrender to and love of the chosen god or goddess complements the above religious practices. Bhakti-yoga is perfectly compatible with simultaneous fidelity to other yogas. Devotionalism is a recurring theme in the Epic literature and the Purānas. Cf. Bhagavad Gītā XIV. 26: ‘He who serves Me with the unswerving yoga of devotion, transcending the gunas, gains the fitness to become like unto Brahman.’ Bhakti may in part be the fruit of God’s grace, and can assume attitudes and roles analogous to various relationships: master/servant, parent/child, husband/wife, and so forth.

karma-yoga (or –mārga): the yoga or path of ‘works’ or selfless social service; one of the three yogas to spiritual fulfillment or moksa. It is the path to God through selfless action and service to others. Devotion to God through such works means one must learn non-attachment and renunciation regarding the fruits of one’s actions, effectively surrendering oneself to God. Cf. Bhagavad Gītā III.3: ‘Men may pursue either of the two paths I have taught in former times, that of yoga through contemplation of the Truth, as expounded by the sāmkhya, and that of yoga through devotion to disinterested action, as exemplified by the yogins.’ In Gītā II.7 we learn that karma-yoga involves the use of our mind to control the senses and acting without becoming attached to sense-objects. Generally speaking, a karma yogin acts in a dispassionate manner, without attachment to the ‘fruits’ of action, meaning those consequences of actions in and for the agent: for instance, pleasure or pain, success or failure. Thus the karma yogin performs dharma without desire for personal pleasure, success, reward and the like, proper motives being on the order of something like Mohandas K. Gandhi’s satyāgraha (nonviolent resistance; relentless search for truth) or sarvodaya (social good, public interest; universal welfare) or, in a different cultural context, the impersonal motives that inspire members of The Catholic Worker Movement founded by Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day. Indeed, Gandhi is best thought of (and thought of himself as) as karma-yogi. The Hindu nationalist politician Bal Ganghadar (Lokamanya) Tilak (1856-1920) wrote a commentary on the Gītā in which the text is taken to uphold the value of karma-yoga over both bhakti and jñana yoga. Gandhi read Tilak, and in spite of their clear moral and political differences, it’s not unlikely that Tilak’s interpretation had some influence on Gandhi’s own rather idiosyncratic rendering of the text’s meaning. The Gītā, and the notion of karma-yoga, was also central to the life and thought of another Hindu nationalist who later founded ‘Integral Yoga’ and his own āśrama, namely, Śri Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950). In fact, Karmayogin was the title of one of the early journals Aurobindo founded. But Aurobindo could never endorse Gandhi’s whole-hearted commitment to the theory and practice of nonviolence, and it seems unlikely that Gandhi would have countenanced Aurobindo’s later critique of the Gītā (that said, Gandhi was firm in his belief in the need for rational and critical interrogation of religious texts). Tilak, Gandhi and Aurobindo together represent the plausibility of according primacy to karma-yoga vis-à-vis the other yogas, as well as some of the varieties of moral and political practice that follow different interpretations of the Gītā’s discussion of karma-yoga. B.K. Matilal well-summarizes the karma-yoga ideal as elucidated by Krsna in the Gītā: ‘He must possess perfect knowledge of the nature of things and persons, but this knowledge would not lead him to non-action [as is alleged to occur in the śramana traditions like Jainism and Buddhism]. He would do whatever is expected of him by society [within the bounds of reason and ethics] and he would exercise unbiased reason to decide conflicting alternatives, but he would be completely free from any selfish desires, motives or preferences. If he acts of no selfish desire of his own, such acts will not produce any result that may cling to the agent and create further bondage.’

jñāna-yoga: (sometimes, jñāna-mārga or path of knowledge); the yoga of knowledge or wisdom. The path to God through the yoga of wisdom; cf. Bhagavad Gītā IV. 38, 39: ‘Verily, there is no purifier (pavitra) in this world equal to Divine Wisdom. He who is proficient in yoga discovers wisdom within his own soul in the progress of time.’ And, ‘He who is full of faith gains Divine Wisdom, seeking after it with supreme devotion and mastery over his senses. Gaining Wisdom, in no long time he enters the state of supreme peace (parāśānti).’ In Advaita Vedānta, jñāna-yoga is a mental-spiritual discipline the goal of which is moksa (freedom) from karma and the cycles of birth-death-rebirth, in other worlds, awareness of (nirguna) Brahman. In this school, the paths or yogas of bhakti and karma, in the end, subserve jñāna-yoga, which means they are not unimportant, in fact they can and do play an essential role in Advaita. As the most arduous and spiritually fulfilling of the yogas, jñāna-yoga is reserved for those few aspirants possessed of the proper psychological disposition and temperament. The would-be practitioner must evidence four spiritual capacities or abilities (sādhana catustaya): 1) some degree of ability to discriminate (viveka) between the spiritual and the conditioned, between the real and the provisionally real; 2) the renunciation of or indifference to (vairāgya) petty desires and all strivings for sensuous self-satisfaction; 3) attainment of mental tranquility (śamā), self-control (dama), dispassion (uparati), perseverance (titiksā), mental resolve or intentness of mind (samādhāna), and faith (śraddhā; but with connotations of trust, and to be progressively vindicated by knowledge and experience); 4) a positive longing for wisdom and freedom (mumuksutva). Broadly, jñāna-yoga entails the study of Vedāntic texts, sustained reflection upon the philosophical principles of Advaita (under the guidance of a guru), and ‘constant meditation’ (nididhyāsana).

guna(s): quality; attribute; characteristic; constituent; rope; in Sāmkhya philosophy, three gunas (gunasāmyāvasthā) exist in equilibrium with prakrti (primordial matter) until disrupted by the presence of purusa (pure consciousness). The disturbance in equilibrium causes the manifestation of determinate things and the separation of the three qualities or strands: sattva or ‘brightness’ strand, rajas or ‘force’ strand, and tamas or ‘mass’ strand. Guna theory has psychological (better: moral psychological) and epistemological ramifications as well, as sattva denotes eudaimonia and knowledge or the essence of higher mental functions, rajas denotes the will or energy and passion, and tamas denotes dullness, indifference and lethargy, mental inertia. This theory rules out any sharp separation between the metaphysical and the psychological, the epistemological and the ethical, and has been used to account for varying psycho-physiological states, temperaments, and character types (cf. Plato’s tripartite soul). It is comparable in function to the use of yin/yang and qi (or ch’i) in classical Chinese worldviews. In Nyāya-Vaisesika, gunas are qualities that inhere or subsist within substances (dravya). The number of gunas differs canonically from seventeen to twenty-four, and once more indicates an effacement (or at least a lack of sharp boundaries) of the material and the mental, the list including qualities of both types, and even qualities of ‘relation’ (e.g., remoteness and proximity, conjunction and disjunction). Relative to a ‘universal’ or ‘generic property’ (sāmānya or jāti), gunas are ‘abstract particulars,’ that is, particular spatio-temporal occurrences of colors, tastes, dimensions and so on: a particular that instantiates a universal (e.g., the particular redness of this tomato is an instance of universal redness as a property common to all red colors). In this system, the dravya-guna-sāmānya ontology is illustrative of realist metaphysics. In order to make clear that guna instantiation is non-repeatable, guna has recently been translated as ‘qualia,’ as qualities and properties are traditionally repeatable features. According to Gangeśa (Navya-Nyāya), guna ‘is a verdicality-grounding causal condition with respect to awareness’ (Stephen Phillips).

Incidentally, it is commonplace in the Indic religio-philosophical environment to formulate core doctrinal teachings and practices in a triune structure (there is not, however, a strict one-to-one correspondence): the Gītā’s three yogas thus worthy of comparison to the threefold division of the Eightfold Path of the Buddhists and the Triple Gems of the Jains, all three involving the mutually reinforcing practices of mind-heart training, moral virtues or ethics, and intuitive insight or wisdom.

Suggested Reading (I’ve highlighted my favorite translations of the Gītā):

• Aurobindo, Sri. Essays on the Gita. Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1949.
• Aurobindo, Sri. The Life Divine, 2 Vols. Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1977 (1955).
• Aurobindo, Sri. The Synthesis of Yoga. Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1976 (1948).
• Bartley, Christopher. The Theology of Ramanuja. London. Routledge Curzon, 2002.
• Buitenen, J.A.B. van. Rāmānuja on the Bhagavadgītā. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1968.
• Carman, John B. The Theology of Ramanuja: An Essay in Interreligious Understanding. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974.
• Chari, S.M.S. Vaisnavism. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2000.
• Chatterjee, Margaret. Gandhi’s Religious Thought. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983.
• Deutsch, Eliot. Advaita Vedānta: A Philosophical Reconstruction. Honolulu, HI: University Press of Hawaii, 1971.
• Feuerstein, Georg. Introduction to the Bhagavad Gītā: Its Philosophy and Cultural Setting. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 1983.
• Feuerstein, Georg. The Shambhala Encyclopedia of Yoga. Boston, MA: Shambhala, 1997.
• Feuerstein, Georg (with Brenda Feuerstein), trans. The Bhagavad Gītā: A New Translation. Boston, MA: Shambhala, 2011.
• Gandhi, M.K. (Mahadev Desai, trans.). The Gospel of Selfless Action or the Gita according to Gandhi. Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1946 (1930).
• Gonda, Jan. Visnuism and Śivaism: A Comparison. London: Althone Press, 1970.
• Hardy, Friedhelm. Viraha Bhakti: The Early History of Krsna Devotion in South India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.
• Iyer, Raghavan, ed. The Bhagavad Gītā with the Uttara Gītā. Santa Barbara, CA: Concord Grove Press, 1985.
• Larson, Gerald James and Ram Shankar Bhattacharya, eds. Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, Vol. XII, Yoga: India’s Philosophy of Meditation. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2008.
• Lester, Robert C. Rāmānuja on the Yoga. Madras: Adyar Library and Research Center, 1976.
• Lipner, Julius. The Face of Truth: A Study of Meaning and Metaphysics in the Vedantic Theology of Rāmānuja. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986.
• Matilal, Bimal Krishna, ed. Moral Dilemmas in the Mahābhārata. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1989.
• Minor, Robert N., ed. Modern Indian Interpreters of the Bhagavad Gītā. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986.
• Ram-Prasad, Chakravarthi. Advaita Epistemology and Metaphysics: An Outline of Indian Non-Realism. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002.
• Ram-Prasad, Chakravarthi. Knowledge and Liberation in Classical Indian Thought. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
• Sargent, Winthrop, trans. The Bhagavad-Gītā. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994 ed.
• Sharma, Arvind, ed. Essays on the Mahabharata. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2005.
• Sharma, Arvind, ed. Advaita Vedanta: An Introduction. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2004.
• Singh, R. Raj. Bhakti and Philosophy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006.
• Vivekananda, Swami. Jnana-Yoga. New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 1982.
• Vivekananda, Swami. Karma-Yoga and Bhakti-Yoga. New York: Ramakrishna Vivekananda Center, 1982.
• Werner, Karel. Love Divine: Studies in Bhakti and Devotional Mysticism. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1993.
• Zaehner, R.C. The Bhagavadgītā with a Commentary Based on the Original Sources. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1973 (1969). 

Occupy Corporations: How to Cut Corporate Power

“Corporations are people, my friend.” Mitt Romney at Iowa State Fair

 

Corporations are obviously not people.  But Romney is accurate in the sense that corporations have hijacked most of the rights of people while evading the responsibilities. An important part of the social justice agenda is democratizing corporations.  This means we must radically change the laws so people can be in charge of corporations.  We must strip them of corporate personhood and cut them down to size so democracy can work.  People are taking action so democracy can regulate the size, scope and actions of corporations.

 

One of the most basic roles of society is to protect the people from harm.  The massive size of many international corporations makes democratic control over them nearly impossible.

 

Corporate crime is widespread.  The New York Times, ProPublica and others have revealed Wall Street giants like JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs have been charged with fraud many times only to get off by paying hundreds of millions.  Professors at University of Virginia have documented hundreds of corporations which have been found guilty or pled guilty in federal courts.

 

Corporate abuse is even more widespread.  For example, Corporate Accountability International named six to its Corporate Hall of Shame, including: Koch Industries for spending over $50 million to fund climate change denial; Monsanto for mass producing cancer causing chemicals; Chevron for dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the Ecuadorian Amazon; Exxon Mobil for being the worst polluter; Blackwater (now Xe) for killing unarmed Iraqi civilians and hiring paramilitaries; and Halliburton, the nation’s leading war profiteer.

 

Making corporations responsible to democracy of the people is challenging considering Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest corporation, does more business itself annually than all but two dozen of the two hundred plus countries in the world.   Without dramatic changes, how can we expect people in small or even big countries to force corporations like Wal-Mart, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, BP, Toyota or Chevron to live by the same rules all the people have to? 

 

Justice demands we make sure corporations do not harm people.  Democracy must require that they operate for the common good.

 

In order to cut corporations down to size, the people must strip corporations of the special artificial legal protections they have created for themselves.

 

The story of how corporations took the full rights of legal persons in one of the great perverse tragedies in legal history. Corporations have worked the courts mercilessly since 1819 to take a wide variety of constitutional rights that were designed to cover only people.  For example, the Fourteenth Amendment was passed in 1868 to make sure all citizens, particularly freed slaves and people of color, had full rights.  There was no mention of protecting corporations. But corporations jumped on this opportunity resulting in a questionable Supreme Court decision that granted them legal personhood.  At roughly the same time, the Supreme Court approved “separate but equal” racial segregation.  Thus in thirty years, African Americans lost their legal personhood, while corporations acquired theirs.

 

Corporations now claim: 1^st amendment free speech rights to advertise and influence elections: 4^th amendment search and seizure rights to resist subpoenas and challenges to their criminal actions; 5^th amendment rights to due process; 14^th amendment rights to due process where corporations took the rights of former slaves and used them for corporate protection; plus rights under the Commerce and Contracts clauses of the constitution.

 

The most recent corporate judicial takeover of constitutional rights is the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United versus the Federal Election Commission.  The court ruled that corporations are protected by the First Amendment so they can use their money to influence elections.

 

Because of the bad Supreme Court decisions, it takes a constitutional amendment by the people to change the laws back.  An amendment requires two-thirds of both houses of Congress to agree then three-quarters of the states must vote to ratify.  This will take real work.  But despite the growing size and unrestricted power of corporations, people are fighting back. 

 

Dozens of groups are working to reverse Citizens United and restore limits on corporate election advocacy.  In January 2011, groups delivered petitions signed by over 750,000 people calling on Congress to amend the Constitution and reverse the decision.  More than 350 local events were held in late January 2012 to challenge the Citizens United decision.

 

Groups challenging this injustice include Code Pink, Common Cause, Free Speech for People, Moveon.org, Move to Amend, National Lawyers Guild, POCLAD, Public Citizen, People for American Way, The Center for Media and Democracy, and Women’s League for Peace and Freedom.  

 

Many groups are asking for a broad constitutional amendment that makes it clear that corporations are not people and should not be given any constitutional rights.  Representatives Ted Deutsch of Florida, Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont have sponsored bills in Congress to start the process for a constitutional amendment to make it clear that corporations are not people, are not entitled to the rights of people, and cannot contribute to political campaigns. 

 

There are also many energetic actions at the state level.  People for the American Way list organizational efforts in nearly all 50 states to end corporate influence in elections or amend the constitution. 

 

Massive corporations now rule the earth.  But they are recent arrivals which can and should be dispatched.  It is time for people to again take control.  The legal fiction of corporate personhood and the constitutional rights taken by corporations must cease.  Join the efforts to cut them down to size and restore the right of the people to govern.

 

By Bill Quigley.  Bill is a human rights lawyer who teaches at Loyola University New Orleans and works with the Center for Constitutional Rights.  A version of this article with full sources is available. You can reach Bill at [email protected]

 

 

 

Dreams and Dreaming: A Select Bibliography

Le Rêve (The Dream) is a 1932 oil painting by Pablo Picasso.

The select bibliography for “dreams and dreaming” is here. What follows is material on dreams and dreaming from several civilizations, cultures, and worldviews, as well as reflections on same from sundry writers, psychologists, and philosophers. It is hoped that these nuggets of analysis and insight will grant one a taste (rasa) of the wonderful world of dreams. I firmly believe that most of us who identify with the Religious or Spiritual Left are, in the best sense of the term, incorrigible dreamers.

“[D]reams are meaningful and dreaming a purposeful activity.”—Sudhir Kakar

“Dreams…are communications with the soma, psyche, polis, or cosmos of the dreamer.”—Sudhir Kakar

“Thanks mainly to Freud, the dream has been overwhelmingly in the hands of the psychologists. We cannot blame the psychologists for this, because they have proper business with the dream. But few humanist scholars have bothered to look directly at the dream as a subjective experience that has, however delusively, aroused in us all a sense of being alive in an unusual way. One scholar will write about Kafka and the dream, another about Mann or Strindberg and the dream, but few write about the dream itself. The average person is so used to dreaming that dreaming becomes as unremarkable as shaving or daydreaming on the bus. Yet for several hours each night, most of us invent and populate an outrageous world into which we are involuntarily projected to take our chances like the hero of a novel or a film. This is a staggering fact about human consciousness, this other reality….”—Bernard O. States

“Everyone approaches the subject, first and foremost, through their own personal dreaming. This is true for researchers and clinicians as well.”—Kelly Bulkeley

The most widely accepted facts about ordinary dreams are as follows: “(1) Nearly all humans remember at least some dreams. (2) A very small number of people report never dreaming. (3) Ordinary dreams are mostly visual and auditory, with some tactile sensations and very little smell or taste. (4) The whole range of emotions can appear in dreams but many dreams have no emotional tone at all. (5) High-level mental abilities for rational thought, decision-making, and self-reflection are active and normally functional in some dreams, but not in others. (6) Most dreams contain one or more characters other than the dreamer. (7) Many dreams involve speaking, listening and common forms of social interaction.”—Kelly Bulkeley

The following have been claimed as additional patterns in the form and content of ordinary dreams: “(1) Children dream more often of animals than adults do. (2) Women tend to remember more dreams than men do. (3) Men’s dreams tend to be more aggressive and sexual than women’s dreams. (4) Men dream more often of male characters than female characters, while women tend to dream evenly about male and female characters. (5) Falling dreams are much more common than flying dreams. (6) Some dreams include explicit reference to cultural symbols and metaphors. (7) The primary emotional concerns and activities of the waking life are accurately reflected in the frequencies of various elements of the dream content (the continuity hypothesis).”—Kelly Bulkeley 

After Jung, we might make a distinction between “little” and “big” dreams. With regard to the latter: “(1) Many cultures do make a general distinction between significant and insignificant dreams, after casting it in religious terms (e.g., divine dream visions and merely human dreams). (2) Nightmares are an especially widespread form of highly memorable dreaming, with a high prevalence among the general population of two primal themes: being chased or attacked by another character (especially animals) and falling or losing control of one’s body (e.g., feeling paralyzed). (3) At the other end of the emotional spectrum, some highly memorable dreams involve feelings of intense sexual pleasure that carry over into physiological arousal on waking (wet dreams). (4) Among the most emotionally positive big dreams are those involving seemingly magical phenomena (e.g., flying, dead people appearing alive again), with qualities of unusually intense realism. (5) Other factors associated with big dreams include recurrence, aesthetics, bizarreness, temporality, and lucidity.”—Kelly Bulkeley

“At the farthest edge of speculation a science of big dreams allies itself with the study of other non-linear processes such as weather, quantum physics, star formation, and art, which spontaneously generate new clusters of emergent order. From this perspective the open-ended dynamism and chaotic creativity of dreaming can be seen as provoking the conscious mind into a greater understanding of itself and the world.”—Kelly Bulkeley

“…[C]ontemporary philosophical and scientific literature has affirmed [the] ancient notion of the dream as prognostication, if this is understood not merely as foretelling the future, but as giving shape to the reality that will come to pass.”—Elliot R. Wolfson

“In our times [the] quest for meaning is part of a larger Euro-American movement of investing dreams with existential meaning, which in turn occurs in the context of the erosion of the magical garden and the death of god.”—Gananath Obeyesekere

“The tales of dreams suggest…that dreaming and waking partake of the same reality, which is both spiritual and physical.”—Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty

“The dream ether is the warp that myths are woven on; the weft is individual experience and art. Myths reflect our desire to believe that people really can dream the same dream, a desire that is a deep hope—a dream, if you will—that we all share. The myths that describe such experiences are shared dreams about shared dreams.”—Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty

“[O]ne can justifiably assert that Freud discovered psychoanalysis, or at least its central features, through his own dreams….”—Sigmund Freud

“[I]n spite of [the] self-criticisms, and in spite of the depression which followed the almost total neglect of the book by the outside world—only 35 copies were sold in the first six years after publication—The Interpretation of Dreams was always regarded by Freud as his most important work: ‘Insight such as this,’ he wrote in his preface to the third English edition, ‘falls to one’s lot but once in a lifetime.’”—James Strachey

“Anyone who has failed to explain the origin of dream-images can scarcely hope to understand phobias, obsessions or delusion or to bring a therapeutic influence to bear on them.”—James Strachey

“It may happen that a piece of material occurs in the content of a dream which in the waking state we do not recognize as forming a part of our knowledge or experience.”—Sigmund Freud

“[D]reams have at their command memories which are inaccessible in waking life.”—Sigmund Freud

“Now most dream-images are unique experiences; and that fact will contribute impartially towards making us forget all dreams.”—Sigmund Freud

“[T]he emergence of impulses which are foreign to our moral consciousness is merely analogous…to the fact that dreams have access to ideational material which is absent in our waking state or plays but a small part in it.”—Sigmund Freud

“I have been driven to realize that here once more we have one of those not infrequent cases in which an ancient and jealously held popular belief seems to be nearer the truth than the judgment of the prevalent science of today. I must affirm that dreams really have a meaning and that a scientific procedure for interpreting them is possible.”—Sigmund Freud

Regarding the psychological preparation of the subject for dream interpretation in psychoanalysis: “We must aim at bringing about two changes in him: an increase in the attention he pays to his own psychical perception and the elimination of the criticism by which he normally shifts the thoughts that occur to him.” [These are uncannily similar to preliminary practices for meditation instruction.]—Sigmund Freud

“I am far from seeking to maintain that I am the first writer to have had the idea of deriving dreams from wishes.”—Sigmund Freud

“[D]reams are given their shape in individual human beings by the operation of two psychical forces (or we may describe them as currents or systems); and that one of those forces constructs the wish which is expressed by the dream, while the other exercises a censorship upon this dream-wish and, by the use of that censorship, forcibly brings about a distortion in the expression of the wish.”—Sigmund Freud

“[A] dream is a (disguised) fulfillment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish.”—Sigmund Freud

A dream can both express and gratify a wish.

Anxiety dreams are a sub-species of dreams with a distressing content, the anxiety being superficially attached to the idea that accompanies it. Freud concedes that anxiety dreams are “dream structures unpropitious from the point of view of the wish-theory.”

“Freud eventually abandoned the idea that every dream was the gratification of a wish. In particular, he left open the possibility that a dream might be a manifestation—and representation of anxiety. And anxiety can be a realistic response to the world.”—Jonathan Lear

With regard to the manifest content of dreams: “(1) [D]reams show a clear preference for the impressions of the immediately preceding days; (2) they make their selection upon different principles from our waking memory, since they do not recall what is essential and important but what is subsidiary and unnoticed; [and] (3) they have at their disposal the earliest impressions of our childhood and even bring up details from that period of our life which, once again, strike us as trivial and which in our waking state we believe to have been long since forgotten.”—Sigmund Freud

Displacement refers to what occurs when “ideas which originally had only a weak charge of intensity take over the charge from ideas which were intensely cathected [charged with psychical energy] and at last attain enough strength to enable them to force an entry into consciousness.”—Sigmund Freud

“Censorship is served by processes such as displacement, whereby intensity and apparent importance are detached from a significant idea and passed along, by associative paths, to an insignificant idea. Displacement, along with condensation and other aspects of primary process constitutive of unconscious processing, are formal, syntactically characterisable operations. They account for the dream-work’s success in disguising desire, in the negative sense of making the content of wishes inaccessible.”—Sebastian Gardner

“Dreams are never concerned with trivialities; we do not allow our sleep to be disturbed by trifles. The apparently innocent dreams turn out to be quite the reverse when we take the trouble to analyze them.”—Sigmund Freud

The latent content of dreams refers to the “dream-thoughts” one arrives at through dream-work.

The process of condensation permits us to see how dreams are “meagre and laconic in comparison with the range and wealth of the dream-thoughts.”—Sigmund Freud

“[A] transference and displacement of psychical intensities occurs in the process of dream formation, and it is a result of these that the difference between the text of the dream-content and that of the [latent] dream-thoughts come about.”—Sigmund Freud.

“Dreams are completely egotistical” insofar as “every dream deals with the dreamer himself.”—Sigmund Freud

In describing the interpretation of dreams as “the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind,” Freud is referring, in Jonathan Lear’s words, to “the conscious waking activity of interpreting dream-memories in the analytic situation.”

If one takes Freud’s principles of dream interpretation seriously, it “emerges that the interpretation of dreams is an ethical activity.”—Jonathan Lear

“More than any other psychic phenomenon, dreams reveal so regularly and so graphically the variety of unconscious forces, including the unconscious ego and superego as well as dynamic and genetic factors. As compromise formations rather than mere wish fulfillments, dreams prove crucial for indicating the nature of pathology and defensive structure.”—Patrick J. Mahony

“What is meant by lucid dreaming? The French dream theorist Michel Jouvet puts it thus: ‘A dream is lucid when the subject, while dreaming, knows he or she is dreaming. This peculiar state allows the dreamer a certain measure of control over the actual unfolding of the dream and a sense of freedom through being able to explore the dream world according to his or her own inclinations’ [The Paradox of Sleep (Laurence Garey, trans.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999: 761]. What is striking about lucid dreaming is that, like its Buddhist and Hindu precursors, it provides technologies for disciplining oneself in order to dream lucidly. A detailed account of these technologies is found in the work of an important theorist, Stephen LeBerge, whose pioneering work Lucid Dreaming [1987] was followed by Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming [1990], written with his collaborator Howard Rheingold.”—Gananath Obeyesekere

“In the West, mentions of lucid dreaming can be found in the writing of philosophers Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Reid, Pierre Gassendi and the first mention in Europe was in a letter written by St. Augustine of Hippo in 415 AD.”—Fariba Bogzaran

“Perhaps the awareness of lucid dreaming in Western academic circles [first] occurred with the publication of Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys (1822-1892), a Sinologist who published Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger: observations pratiques (Dreams and the Ways to Direct Them: Practical Observations or often translated as Dreams and How to Guide Them). He documented more than twenty years of personal investigation into lucid dreams. Although working with dreams was not at the centre of his career, his book influenced and inspired many in the arts and literature including the surrealist André Breton. The name ‘lucid dreaming’ was coined by Dutch psychiatrist Frederick van Eden in 1913.”—Fariba Bogzaran

“Research and first-person accounts show that in lucid dreaming, different levels of intentionality can be carried out, such as transforming a self-image, ego-splitting; spiritual experiences; meeting the deceased; witnessing, entering hyperspace; healing, and encountering inner light.”—Fariba Bogzaran

“[W]hile lucid dream theory claims to have been influenced by Tibetan dream yoga, the latter has little affinity with lucid dreams.”—Gananath Obeyesekere

“The boundaries between waking and dreaming are more permeable in the Hindu, specifically Upanishadic thought.”—Sudhir Kakar

In the Mahābhārata, we find “a set of contrasting dreams on the eve of a great battle: nightmares in those who are about to be defeated, auspicious dreams in those who are about to conquer.”—Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty

“[I]t is argued in the Yogavāsistha, when we take the material universe to be the ultimate reality, we make a mistake comparable to the mistake someone makes when he thinks he sees his head cut off in a dream, a traditional image in Indian dream books.”—Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty

(Boston) Global Balance & 'The Hermeneutics of Suspicion'

Michael Moreland raises an interesting question over at Mirror of Justice today -http://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2012/02/mitt-romney-conscience-and-the-boston-globes-mistakes.html.  He implicates, I think, an even more interesting one. 

Michael references a recent Boston Globe story, to which he helpfully links.  The story concerns certain putative discrepencies between Mitt Romney's current campaign trail condemnations of the HHS's recent decision requiring insurance coverage of contraception for employees of religiously affiliated schools and hospitals, on the one hand, and Mr. Romney's own enforcement of a Massachussetts law requiring abortion coverage back in 2005, on the other hand.  Michael takes the story for evidence that the Globe is aiming to draw a spurious equivalence between Messrs. Romney and Obama, and in so doing both to 'impugn' Mr. Romney and to 'defend[ ] the Obama Administration's attack on religious freedom in the HHS decision.'  I take Michael's story itself for possible - though only possible - evidence of something else. 

To set the stage for what I have in mind here:  I read the piece that Michael takes to task and, somewhat to my surprise, found it to be much more balanced than his post had led me to expect.  

First it seems clear in the story that it is not the Globe that is suggesting any Romnobama equivalence, but C. J. Doyle of the Catholic Action League.  Mr. Doyle figures prominently in a large photograph accompanying the story and is quoted, quite early on, as saying that '[t]he initial injury to Catholic religious freedom came not from the Obama administration but from the Romney administration.' Of course we hear like remarks all of the time from other conservatives, who routinely note 'Obamacare's' precedent in 'Romneycare,' and surely are not taken on that account by anyone for defenders of Mr. Obama, let alone of attacks on religious freedom.

Second, and in keeping with that last observation, there is no evident defense in the article of Mr. Obama, let alone of the recent HHS decision, at all.  Mr. Doyle himself indeed goes on to say, in the paragraph just cited, that 'President Obama's plan certainly constitutes an assault on the constitutional rights of Catholics.'  It's just that Mr. Doyle is 'not sure Governor Romney is in a position to assert that, given his own very mixed record on this' (emphasis supplied).  So far as I can tell, Mr. Doyle looks to be neither 'impugning Mitt Romney' nor 'defending the Obama Administration's attack on religious freedom in the HHS decision' here. He's simply invoking a variant of the Clean Hands Doctrine and, again, is far from the only conservative doing so these days where Mr. Romney is concerned.

Thirdly worth noting, it seems to me, is that the Globe story also makes plain at the outset that Mr. Romney first sought to veto the legislation upon which he was acting in requiring Catholic hospitals in 2005 to provide emergency contraception to victims of sexual predation, and that he 'angered reproductive rights advocates' in so doing. That almost reads like a defense of Mr. Romney in face of the now well familiar conservative line taken against him.

Fourth, the story (a) notes conspicuously that plenty of conservative Catholics as prominent as Mr. Doyle give Mr. Romney the benefit of the doubt where his positional shifts on life questions are concerned, and (b) leaves the distinct impression - surely accurate - that the weight of American Catholic opinion is very much opposed to the Obama HHS's recent decision. If there's any 'negative focus' at work here, then, it seems to me it is fixed at least as (or more) directly upon Mr. Obama as (or than) it is upon Mr. Romney.

Finally the Globe story also, near its end, quotes the reliably and, it now seems, obligatorily quotable 'zany' new Catholic Newt Gingrich, who levels charges agains Mr. Romney more or less identical to those leveled by the Catholic Action League's Mr. Doyle and other conservatives. The only surprise occasioned by this particular quote is its not turning up until near the end of the story. Were the story meant for a hatchet job on Mr. Romney, a puff piece on Mr. Obama, or an equivalence piece on both, one might have expected the characteristically incendiary Gingrich quote to figure more prominently.  Indeed one might have expected the Globe to play up the now familiar 'Romney hypocrisy' narrative and picture Mr. Gingrich, mouth open as ever, pointing or wagging a finger toward the camera lens in the generally expected 'J'accuse' manner.

On balance, then, it doesn't seem to me that there is any reason to be indulging suspicions of the Globe on the basis of this story. Indeed if anything, it is rather refreshingly more balanced than much of what we find in the more familiar news organs, and surely worthy of praise on that account. Certainly it rides far lighter on the oft-purportedly opportunistic Mr. Romney than most 'liberals' and 'conservatives' tend to do.  Why, then, does the story elicit the reaction it does from Michael? 

Here is my worry, which is of a type I am sure many now share:  In times like the present it is just all too easy to fall prey to paranoia in interpreting the words and actions of those with whom we are accustomed to disagreeing.  We are, after all, moving through troubled and unfamiliar waters right now, and accordingly prone to a bit more than the usual measure of fear and loathing that modern life can induce.  Economic and social conditions are such as we'd thought locked in the history books.  People speak of 'decline' in a way that they used to do only of other 'lost empires.'  And all the while urgently needed restorative action is blocked, always and everywhere, by all-the-time frowning and sneering, ignorant yayhoos elected a bit over a year ago by scared angry voters.  If the (in the main) shockingly ill-informed, ill-educated, ill-tempered cranks recently seeking the Republican nomination for President are any indication, moreover, it would seem we are in for far worse even than we find on their side of the aisle in Congress right now.  (Let us pray they're a tiny minority in Congress itself come next year.)

Against this backdrop, I'm inclined to think it a good idea for us with the charity of heart and clarity of head requisite to the task to read newspaper stories with a good dose of trust in good faith - defeasible trust, sure, but trust nonetheless.  A piece covering some matter associated with some candidate might get it wrong, or might lend itself to some false impression or other, sometimes.  But surely few authors intend that.  Yes, there's a widespread tendency to notice, and then write about, things that play into some popular narrative, and that can admittedly be harmful and is in any event a manifestation of mediocrity.  But mediocrity isn't bad faith.  It is more like 'the mean' than 'mean spirit' - a sort of arithmetic mean among popular media.  Let us induce a rise in that mean, then, by critiquing laze and cliche where we find them, rather than eliciting unhelpful defensiveness by imputing bad faith where it's dubitable.  That'll be my resolution, anyway.         

A final, more personal plea in respect of my own motives here, for what little it might be worth: I am, as it happens, among those inclined to take Mr. Romney at his word when he speaks of his relatively recent 'life issues epiphany,' and even find the story moving.  That is so even as I literally pray Mr. Romney be far less sincere in his profession of new faith in the 'old religion' of 1928-style economic policy, which would be absolutely calamitous for our nation and the world and must - absolutely must - be prevented. I am also among the many who were surprised by the recent HHS decision, which I believe Mr. Obama soon will recognize for the uncharacteristically oafish and destructive blunder that it was.  I am not, then, myself trying in this post to 'impugn' Mr. Romney or 'defend' Mr. Obama.   There'll be occasion enough for that soon, I am sure.

The Media and Presidential Politics

I have a friend who was once the Editor for the New York City desk of the New York Times. As such, he attended the general editors' meetings. He said it was the same thing every election cycle. At the beginning of the cycle the editors said this time we will concentrate on the issues and not the horse race. And, he lamented, every election the Times concentrated on the horse race.

This time I think the reporting has been somewhat better than usual, but only somewhat. The reporting has concentrated on the Republican horse race, on the gaffes, hypocracies, and character flaws of the candidates, and to some extent what they believe (or in the case of the leading candidates purport to believe).

Romney and Gingrich offer excellent examples of why reporters are loathe to concentrate on the issues: experience tells us that candidates tell us what they need to get elected rather than what they will do when they govern. So how are we to know what candidates will do if they win. My advice: follow the money. The media is even doing a better job here. we know that Romney is getting a lot of money from hedge funds and the financial sector including Goldman Sachs because of media reporting. The next step is rarely taken by the media. Why is Goldman Sachs giving money to Romney? What do they want? And why do they fear Gingrich? In this circumstance, part of the financial industries' motivation is obvious. Glass Steagall comes to mind. But what else do they want.

Who is giving money to Obama and what do they want. If we are to know more how a President will try to govern, as I say, we need to follow the money. 

Online Bibliographies on Motley Subjects

Here is the list of motley bibliographies to date in my Directed Reading series inaugurated in March of 2008 at the Ratio Juris blog. Some of these lists I’ve since updated a bit, so if you want the latest version, just e-mail me. I hope to finish posting all of the proposed bibliographies before proceeding to systematically update them. Of course I welcome suggestions and comments. Many of these lists were first posted at various law blogs and some are found online at several university and other library sites. They are far from exhaustive and probably more than a tad idiosyncratic (especially because most of them were put together in the first instance for yours truly), nevertheless, I think they should prove useful for basic research endeavors. (At the respective blog posts, click on the appropriate highlighted term for the bibliography in Word doc. form.)

• American Indian Law
• Analogy and Metaphor
• Animal Ethics, Rights, and Law
• Bioethics
• Buddhism
• Christianity
• Classical Chinese Worldviews
• Comparative Law
• Constitutionalism
• The Contemporary Arab World
• Criminal Law, Punishment, and Prisons
• Death and Dying
• Dreams and Dreaming
• Ecological and Environmental Worldviews
• The Emotions
• The Ethics, Economics, and Politics of Global Distributive Justice (First draft used in Professor Appelbaum’s course, ‘Global 2: An Introduction to Global Socioeconomic and Political Processes’ in the Global and International Studies Program at University of California, Santa Barbara)
• Freudian and Post-Freudian Psychology
• Health: Law, Ethics, and Social Justice
• Hinduism
• Human Rights
• International Law
• Islamic Studies (Early draft published in Ian Richard Netton, ed., Encyclopedia of Islamic Civilisation and Religion (New York: Routledge, 2008): 741-799, and available online at Islamic Philosophy Online and several university library websites)
• Israeli/Palestinian Conflict
• Judaism and Jewish Philosophy
• Marx and Marxism
• Mass Media: Politics, Political Economy, and Law
• Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory
• Science and Technology
• Slavery
• Socio-Political Conflict Resolution and Nonviolence
• Terrorism
• Torture: Moral, Political, and Legal Dimensions
• The World of Work and Labor Law

Forthcoming:

• Aesthetic Theory and Philosophy of Art
• Capital Punishment
• Chinese Medicine
• Contract Law
• Democratic Theory and Praxis (First draft published in two issues of The Good Society)
• Law and Literature (early draft available at The Literary Table)
• Tort Law
• Zionism

Facts & Values, Truth & Objectivity—An Introduction (Part III)

This is the third and final installment of our series. The first post is here, and the second is here.

‘Recently Iris Murdoch has put forward the view that the whole “fact/value” dichotomy stems from a faulty moral psychology: from the metaphysical picture of “the neutral facts” (apprehended by a totally uncaring faculty of reason) and the will which, having learned the neutral facts, must “choose values” either arbitrarily (the existentialist picture) or on the basis of “instinct.” I think she is right; but setting this moral psychology right will involve deep philosophical work involving the notions of “reason” and “fact” (as she, of course, recognizes).’—Hilary Putnam

‘The concept factual judgment or judgment with a truth-value and the concept of ethical judgment will be different concepts—such a distinction is there to be made, just as the concept mouse and the concept mammal are different concepts—but the distinctness does not preclude a judgment’s being both a factual and an ethical judgment. Compare the way in which the distinct concepts mouse and mammal will each collect any particular mouse you please, Timmy Willy or Johnny Town or whichever, within their extensions. Ethical judgments could be a subset of factual judgments even if they were an utterly special and essentially contestable subset. In this way, we can have a clear difference between the ethical-as-such and the factual-as-such without any dichotomy between their property provinces. The hope of making good a claim of this sort is the characteristic hope of ethical objectivism or moral cognitivism.’—David Wiggins

‘A predicate stands for a natural property if it is indispensable to the exposition or development of some natural science (or to some similarly strictly empirical-cum-explanatory mode of investigation). A non-natural property is simply one that is not like that. It is a myth and the opposite of the truth that our grasp of properties that are natural in this sense is better than our grasp of the non-natural.’—David Wiggins

‘Consider the ethical predicate “considerate.” That which marks out or delimits or decries or discriminates the property of considerateness in acts or attitudes or human characters is an essentially ethical interest, in pursuit of which we can deploy any mode of investigation or and associated concept that suits the case. The presence of such properties, that is, of value properties, is ascertained by all the multifarious means that are called for by the exercise of our grasp of this or that ethical concept. Such properties are to be conceived in light of what it takes to exercise that grasp—not vice versa. A particular ethical property, we might say, is to be identified or singled out as the property which the reasonable exercise of the grasp of such and such a concept, as regulated by criticism, hunts down.’—David Wiggins

‘Objectivity calls for putting one’s idiosyncratic predilections and parochial preferences aside in forming one’s beliefs, evaluations and choices. It is a matter of proceeding in line not with one’s inclinations but with the dictates of impartial reason. The universality of reason must be recognized: What is rational for one person to do, to believe, or to value will thereby also of necessity be equally rational for all the rest of us who might find ourselves in the same circumstances. For rationality is inherently “objective:” it does not reconfigure itself to meet the idiosyncratic predilections of particular individuals. To be sure, objectivity will have to take context into account, seeing that different individuals and groups confront very different objective situations. Rationality is universal, but it is circumstantially universal—and objectivity with it. It is a matter of what “any of us” would do in one’s place. [….] The contextuality of good reasons can be reconciled with the universality of rationality itself by taking a hierarchical view of the process through which the absolutistic (and uniform) conception of ideal rationality is thought to bear context differently, on the resolution of concrete cases and particular situations.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘The content of an assertion is intrinsically related to a conceptual scheme. [….] In effect, propositions, true or false, are implicitly indexed to some conceptual scheme or schemes. [….] Facts are internal to conceptual schemes, or ways of dividing the world into objects, among which there can be equally acceptable alternatives. [….] [S]uch metaphysical pluralism is consistent with realism about truth.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘[I]n taking concepts to be flexible and fluid like, the pluralist is not saying that we are confused about our concepts. Rather, the point is that concepts are not absolutely determinate or closed; they do not have a fixed use in every possible situation. This does not imply, however, that no concepts have determinate uses in all actual situations. Some concepts may be perfectly determinate in actual situations, but not in all possible situations. [….] For the pluralist, concepts are…flexible; they are subject to possible extension in the fact of unforeseen circumstances. Hence, there can be irresolvable disagreements over how to apply any concept. In a sense, concepts are therefore always possibly vague in a nonpejorative sense; they have what Waismann called “open texture.”’—Michael P. Lynch

‘Minimally speaking, a proposition is true in the realist sense when things are as that proposition says they are. Some aspect of objective reality must simply be a certain way. If it is, then the proposition is true; if not, the proposition is false. The truth of the proposition hinges on the world alone, not on our thought about the world. In short, realism about truth minimally implies two commitments: (a) truth is an authentic property that some propositions have and others lack, and (b) the concept of truth is, in Putnam’s words, “radically non-epistemic;” that is, whether a proposition is true (in most cases) does not depend on what I or anyone else believes or knows. [….] According to correspondence accounts of truth, there are three metaphysical aspects to any true proposition: the proposition itself (the truth bearer), its correspondence (the truth relation), and the reality to which it corresponds (the truth marker). [….] In other words, propositions are true when they correspond to the facts.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘[T]here is no logical incoherence in supposing that facts and propositions are relative to conceptual schemes and that truth is the correspondence of (relative) propositions with (relative) facts.’—Michael P. Lynch

Truth is objective; it is good to believe what is true; truth is a goal worthy of human inquiry; and truth is worth caring about for its own sake.

‘Thinking about why we should care about truth tells us two things about it: first, that truth is, in part, a deeply normative property—it is a value. And second, this is a fact that any adequate theory of truth must account for. In light of this fact, I suggest that truth, like other values, should be understood as depending on, but not reducible to, lower-level properties. Yet which properties truth depends on or supervenes on may change with the type of belief in question. This opens the door to a type of pluralism: truth in ethics may be realized differently than in physics.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘Truth is a property that is good for beliefs to have. Since propositions are the content of beliefs, and it is the content of a belief and not the act of believing that is true, we can also say that truth is the property that makes a proposition good to believe.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘All truths are relative, yes, but our concept of truth needn’t be a relative concept.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘[T]he conditions under which a proposition is true are partly determined by the conceptual scheme in which the proposition is expressed. But what makes a proposition true is not its relation to a scheme but whether or not the conditions in question obtain. For a claim to be true (or false), the conditions must be relative to a scheme. Yet the reason that the claim is true is not because it is relative to a scheme (as the truth relativist must hold); it is true because it is the case.[….] A fact, in the human sense, is simply what is the case.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘Deflationists are right to be skeptical of the thought that any one traditional theory of truth can tell us what all and only true beliefs have in common. At a suitable level of abstraction, understanding what true beliefs are simply involves simply understanding what they do—their role in our cognitive economy. To play this role is to satisfy certain truisms, truisms that display truth’s connection to other concepts. It is this truth-role that gives truth its unity; the features that are constitutive of this role are what true propositions have in common, and simply having those features is what we ordinarily mean by saying that a proposition is true. But not all facts are exhausted by the truisms. One such facts is that there is more than one property that make beliefs true. Truth…is immanent in those other properties of beliefs. In some domains, what makes a belief true is that it corresponds to reality; in others, beliefs are made true by a form of coherence. [….] [Traditional theories of truth] are not best conceived of as theories of truth itself. They are better seen as theories of the properties that make beliefs true—or manifest truth.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘Truth is immanent in distinct properties of beliefs; our ordinary concept of truth is univocal.’—Michael P. Lynch

Core Folk Truisms (there may be other truisms): 1. Objectivity: ‘The belief that p is true if, and only if with respect to the belief that p, things are as they are believed to be…is a central truism about truth.’ 2. Norm of Belief: It is prima facie correct to believe that p if and only if the proposition that p is true.’ 3. Warrant of Independence: ‘Some beliefs can be true but not warranted and some can be warranted without being true.’ 4. End of Inquiry: Other things being equal, true beliefs are a worthy goal of inquiry.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘A theory of truth should make sense of the following metaphysical principle: Truth is One: There is a single property named by “truth” that all and only true propositions share.’ The theory should also be ‘able to make sense of the intuition that drives pluralism about truth, namely, Truth is Many: there is more than one way to be true.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘[T]ruth is a single higher-level property whose instantiations across kinds of propositions are determined by a class of other, numerically distinct properties. [….] Truth is many because different properties may manifest truth in distinct domains of inquiry. In those domains they have the truish features [we find in those folk-truisms enumerated above]. Truth is one because there is a single property so manifested, and “truth” rigidly names that property.’—Michael P. Lynch

‘Truth is an immanent functional property that is variably manifested.’—Michael P. Lynch

An atomic proposition of some domain is true, if and only if, it has the particular property that manifests true for propositions in that domain. The truth-value of compounds supervenes on the truth-value of atomic propositions.

‘In the denial that artwork can or should make truth claims I see formalism joining hands with romanticism, to yield an aestheticism that renders art autonomous, to be sure, and perhaps even pleasantly anarchic, but also cut off from the rest of life, deracinated, robbed of its claim upon conscience or consciousness, and so transformed into little more than the toy of decadence.’—Lenn E. Goodman

‘I think artworks do make truth claims, even if not always propositionally. But no truth claim is self-validating, and artistic claims are not made true by virtue of their medium. Perhaps the most suspect of pretensions in behalf of artistic truth is the idea that art’s higher truth is somehow exempt from the demands of human understanding, critical thought, or moral judgment. That makes artists into hit-and-run oracles. Surely, even a higher truth, if it really is truth, is worthy and capable of scrutiny. That means that works of artistic fancy can and should he held accountable for their veracity, on whatever level they can make good their claims.’—Lenn E. Goodman

 ‘[A] uniformitarian absolutism at the high-generality level of “what rationality is” is perfectly consonant with a pluralism and relativism at the lower level of concrete resolutions regarding “what is rational” within the contextual setting of particular cases. The ruling principles of rationality never uniquely constrain their more specific circumstantial implementations. At each step along the way we repeat the same basic situation: delimitation, yes; determination, no. The sought-for reconciliation between the universalistic absoluteness of rationality and the variability and relativity of its particular rulings is thus provided for by the consideration that the absolutism of principles operates at the highest level of the hierarchy of rational development, while there is ever “slack” and variability as one moves towards the lowest level of concrete determinations. The variability and relativity of good reasons at the level of our actual operations can indeed be reconciled with the absolutism of rationality itself by taking a hierarchical view of the process through which the absolutistic conception of ideal rationality is brought to bear on the resolution of concrete circumstances and particular situations.’—Nicholas Rescher 

‘In characterizing a belief as objectively rational we are certainly not claiming that there is a universal consensus about it. No matter how sensible a contention on any significant issue may be, there is an ever-present prospect that some people—perhaps even many—will nevertheless quite defensibly and appropriately dissent from it. The validity of our judgments is emphatically not destroyed by finding that there are people who reject them.’—Nicholas Rescher 

‘We have to come to terms with epistemic realities, which include:

• the diversity in people’s experiences and cognitive situations
• the variation of “available data”
• the underdetermination of facts by data (all too frequently insufficient)
• the variability of people’s cognitive values (evidential security, simplicity, etc.)
• the variation of cognitive methodology and the epistemic “state of the art”

Such factors—and others like them—make for an unavoidable difference in the beliefs, judgments, and evaluations even of otherwise “perfectly rational” people.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘If we are going to be rational we must take—and have no responsible choice but to take—the stance that our own standards (of truth, value, and choice) are the appropriate ones. Be it in employing or in evaluating them, we ourselves must see our own standards as authoritative because this, exactly, is what it is for them to be our own standards—their being our standards consists in our seeing them in this light. We have to see our standards in an absolutistic light—as the uniquely right appropriately valid ones—because this is what is at issue in their being our standards of authentic truth, value, or whatever. To insist that we should view them with indifference is to deny us all prospects of having any standards at all. Commitment at this level is simply unavoidable. Our cognitive or evaluative perspective would not be our perspective did we not deem it rationally superior to others.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘What people think to be true is clearly something that is person-variable and thus relative. We can take the line that “What is true?” is a question that different people can quite appropriately answer differently because of the interpersonal variability of available information. But what truth is all about is something that is…altogether definite and fixed. The evidentiation at issue in the epistemic sector is doubtless interpersonally and intercommunally variable. But variability on the side of information does not make for variation on the side of concepts.’—Nicholas Rescher

‘[W]e can (quite appropriately) disagree about what it is that is true and what good reasons are at hand, while yet maintaining an (appropriately) absolutistic view of what truth and good reasons are. The ideal nature of actual truth and of actual good reasons that inhere in our (defining) conceptions of inquiry establishes a clear limit to the implications of cognitive relativism. To re-emphasize: a pluralistic contextualism of potential basis-diversity is altogether compatible with an absolutistic commitment to our own basis. One can accept the prospect of alternatives as available to the community at large without seeing more than one of them appropriate for oneself. One can combine a pluralism of possible alternatives with an absolutistic position regarding ideal rationality and a firm and reasoned commitment to the standards intrinsic to one’s own position. We ourselves are bound to see our own (rationally adopted) standards as superior to the available alternatives—and are, presumably, rationally entitled to do so in light of the cognitive values we in actual fact endorse. The crux of the pluralism issue lies in the question of just what it is that one is being pluralistic about.’—Nicholas Rescher

The United States: Democracy--or Plutocracy?

There is a terrific article in the new issue of Commonweal, and the article is readily available online, even for nonsubscribers.  Do yourself a favor and read it.

"Plutocracy or Democracy?  How Bad Policies Brought Us a New Gilded Age," by David Carroll Cochran.

Here.

 

 

Catholic Government Officials and Same Sex Marriage

Robert George makes an interesting observation this week over at Mirror of Justice: http://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2012/01/which-side-are-you-on-boys-which-side-are-you-on.html. He notes that it is 'Catholic politicians---mostly Democrats---who are leading the charge to abolish the conjugal understanding of marriage as a one-flesh union of sexually complementary spouses and replace it with a revisionist understanding of marriage as a romantic-sexual domestic partnership.'

Robby finds that this reveals something significant - namely, that 'the philosophical tradition that shapes the reasoning and actions of these people is expressive individualism, or what is sometimes called "life-style liberalism"; it is not Catholicism, or the Judaeo-Christian ethic, or the natural law tradition.  Whatever is to be said for and against that tradition,' Robby continues, 'it is deeply alien (and hostile) to the Catholic tradition's commitments to the sanctity of human life in all stages and conditions and the dignity of marriage as a conjugal partnership.'

I've a good deal of sympathy with Robby's concerns.  And I've no doubt that he is right about at least some Catholic politicians, in surmising that their views and voting behavior might be shaped and guided by some form of expressive individualism. I've also little doubt that some forms of the latter are, at a minimum, in tension with the Catholic and natural law traditions, as well as with some widely accepted understandings of the Jewish and Christian, not to mention Islamic, ethical traditions. I wonder, though, whether a somewhat more charitable interpretation - in a 'giving the benefit of interpretive doubt' understanding of 'charity' here - might not be available to us in the case of some Catholic or otherwise religiously committed government officials.

What I have in mind is this: Perhaps some religiously committed political figures attempt in good faith, how ever successfully or otherwise as an analytic or conceptual matter, to draw a sharp distinction between matters of church (or temple or mosque or ...) on the one hand, and matters of state on the other hand. (Perhaps they've not read, or not read and yet found persuasive, the 'communitarian' literature challenging the distinction.)  Marriage these people might in turn find to constitute a strictly sacramental or ecclesial category, while finding something like 'domestic partnership' to constitute all that there is by way of analogue in the realm of state categories.

These people might then also firmly subscribe and commit to, and with sincere hearts defend and act in accordance with, their congregations' understandings of marriage, while at the same time believing that state functionaries would be abusing state office were they to employ identical criteria in framing the conditions of domestic partnership as they do in framing the conditions of marriage within their ecclesial traditions.  One such criterion that they might then in good faith find legitimate in the first case but not in the second case might be the genders of the would-be spouses or partners.  So far as legitimate state interests are concerned, they might reason, dyadic partnership is what deserves state recognition and favor of various sorts, while sameness of flesh, sexual complementarity, and like matters of profound metaphysical significance are matters of ecclesial but not state competence. 

It is true, of course, that the word 'marriage' is used, at least in the U.S., in respect of both of the categories I mention - ecclesial and state. In that sense, our legal terminology perhaps regrettably conflates the two categories. It seems to me, however, that a, say, Catholic legislator might prefer globally to change the legal terminology where state-recognized domestic partnership is concerned, while at the same time being willing, until some such thing happens, to approve legislation that ends the state's making what amount to ecclesial decisions concerning the substantive criteria upon which state-recognized and -encouraged dyadic domestic partnership is to be determined.

Assuming that the charitable interpretation of at least some tradition-faithful state functionaries' decisions and actions in respect of 'same sex unions' here offered is plausible, it should go without saying that it does not carry over, at least absent further elaboration and argumentation, to the case of such functionaries' decisions or actions in respect of abortion. For that latter, of course, involves not only two acting partners of one sort or another, but innocent third parties as well - or at the very least critically implicates precisely that fateful question.

 

Are Tax Increases Good for the Wealthy?

 Cornell economist Robert Frank has an interesting column in the New York Times here (subscription may be required) in which he argues that tax increases for the rich help the rich. If taxes are increased, the rich drive on better roads, for example, without being worse off in competing to buy luxury goods. As Frank explains, there are “positional” goods that are in short supply like gorgeous waterfront property. Tax increases affect “all participants in the bidding for positional goods. And because it leaves everyone with less to spend, it has essentially no effect on the outcomes of those contests. The same paintings and the same marina slips end up in the same hands as before.”

It would be wonderful if the wealthy read this column and stop its opposition to tax breaks. Frank makes sense, but his counterintuitive message will be hard to absorb. In addition, many of the wealthy want as much money as possible as a symbol of their success and even more important to leave as much as possible for their family. Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of the public oppose tax breaks for the rich and the revenue is needed even if one focuses on bringing the deficit down. One way or another that popular opinion will prevail even in our broken political system.