Strange Doctrines

Naked Logic

Neil Sinhababu provides an interesting argument:

[C]riticism of PETA's nude ads [example] on feminist grounds strikes me as deeply misguided.

What's wonderful about these ads is that they present the nude woman as being more virtuous than her clothed audience, and make her naked body symbolic of her virtue. She's on the right side of the issue, acting as a moral examplar through her nudity, and guiding us to become more virtuous people. (Typical example, and another.) I think the reason PETA does this is to make vegetarianism and animal welfare in general look less like hair-shirted ascetic doctrines, and more glamorous and fun. Now, you could criticize this by saying that the whole spectacle is so ridiculous the moral point is totally lost. I don't think this is right, but at least it's the right question to ask -- a question of whether PETA's tactics are effective, or cost-effective. Criticizing this as some kind of objectification of women is totally wrong. That she's posing nude for animal welfare doesn't make her an object, it makes her a better human being than you.

That's why I like these ads so much. It's really rare in our culture that I see female nudity presented as a positive expression of moral virtue.

Also, naked women posing for animal rights is hot.

The Right to Jump the Shark

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to brandish assault rifles near the president shall not be infringed. Or so the usually (but unfortunately not this time) excellent Will Wilkinson argues.

Consciousness, Control and Responsibility

[Suhlar and Churchland] argue against what they call the "Frail Control" hypothesis advanced by philosophers such as John Doris, which has it that people are far less in control than they suppose, given the influence of unconscious situational factors (lots of experimental data on this). Instead, Suhler and Churchland say that we should expand our notion of responsibility-conferring control to include unconscious and automatic processes, which they point out are robust, ubiquitous, "smart," and essential for effective behavior. Conscious control is all well and good, but not the sine qua non of responsible agency. In which case, they say, people can't appeal to unconscious influences as a new class of excuses, as the Frail Control hypothesis might suggest they could.

Tom Clark has more here.

You Can Extradite a Ham Sandwich

I'm working on an opposition to an extradition request. Part of this involves working through the "complaint," the document that provides the evidentiary basis for the request. The U.S. magistrate judge is supposed to be able to tell from this evidence whether there is probable cause to surrender the fugitive to the requesting country. It is the requesting country's burden to make the probable cause showing.

The complaint in an extradition is not like a criminal complaint or indictment, which are narrative and (ideally) organized. Instead, it's like a big pile of discovery, mostly photocopies of documents prepared with (often) very fine print. Ours is about 300 pages, probably about 75,000 words.

Now, 75,000 words is not that many words. But these 75,000 words are a translation from Spanish, and they read something like the following:

Spirits in the Material World

Epiphenom limns some relations and distinctions between religion, spirituality and humanism.

(Via Cognitive Daily.)

Best Teddy Hagiography

Goes to Anne Laurie. Dashed with a splash of cold water by Koz at the first comment.

(Via Thomas Levenson.)

The Scalia Amendment

Shorter Scalia dissent In Re Troy Anthony Davis: This Constitution shall not be construed to prohibit the execution of those innocent of the charges against them.

3 Quarks Daily Prize in Philosophy

You can nominate your favorite blog post in philosophy and/or take a gander at other nominees here.

Who Does Judge Bybee Play?

Orin Kerr links to Berkeley Law Dean Chris Edley's anodyne defense of BL's retention of John Yoo.

Cato the Elder responds:

What you linked to was the speech of a modern day Pontius Pilate. There are too many reservations and caveats trying to appeal to the worst instincts of the leftist protesters within the essay that it shouldn't properly be called a straightforward defense of academic freedom. This is a coded message to the Berkeley faculty and outside observers: "I wash my hands of him..."

Steve observes:

The analogy of Yoo to Jesus arguably does not hold.

Bot Poetry

Pretty wonderful:



(Via 3 Quarks Daily.)

Of "Guilt" and "Actual Innocence"

I like Thomas Levenson's and Lee Kovarsky's posts about Justice Scalia's dissent in the Troy Davis matter. Scalia seems to suppose that "actual innocence" is a metaphysical judgment to which we have no reliable epistemic access, and of which therefore courts can take no cognizance. Levenson and Kovasky ably dismantle that notion.

But Scalia's dissenting on such a basis is dopey on a much more mundane level. Taking cognizance of relevant evidence to arrive at notionally ontological determinations is a routine function of courts. On Scalia's logic, Troy Davis should never have been convicted; after all, we can never really know whether someone is guilty. And once we admit that courts can find "guilt," we have to allow that they can find "actual innocence."

Postscript: Scalia's dissent (pdf) on its face does not cast the issue as a problem of administrative determination, but of constitutional cognizability. Ultimately I think that this issue presupposes the epistemological argument, but I should have made it clear I was presupposing this implicit content.

It Takes Guts

Marc Ambinder: "Journalists, including myself, were very skeptical when anti-Bush liberals insisted that what Ridge now says is true, was true. We were wrong. [But...] Our skepticism about the activists' conclusions was warranted because these folks based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence."

George W. Bush: "I’m a gut player."

UPDATE: Via Brad DeLong, Marcy Wheeler's shorter Ambinder: "Sorry I Was So Stupid, But I Was Right To Be Stupid."

Abiding the Bullet

Mark Kleiman gets gun rights mail:

I don't think there's anything obviously wrong about people who happen to be President being subject to the same ordinary hazards as people who don't happen to be President. We're not a monarchy, after all, the President is just another citizen. He doesn't carry a "restricted civil liberties" zone around with him, everywhere he goes.

If Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't doing anything on the grassy knoll that would have been illegal if the President had been 200 miles away, there's no basis to arrest him just because a guy holding a particular office happens to be in the neighborhood.

Tax and Save

Jeff Frankel:

Talk about irony! The Reagan tax cuts of 1981-83 and the Bush tax cuts of 2001-03 were both explicitly designed to boost saving — hence their focus on capital income and higher income brackets — and yet in both cases private saving fell in their aftermath. The tax cuts of January 2008 and February 2009 were both explicitly designed to boost consumption; yet private saving rose in their aftermath! 

Be Very Afraid

Another study in the terror management mold.

The conclusion: "The findings that political and dispositional liberals become more politically and psychologically conservative after threats provide convergent experimental support for the contention that conservatism is a basic form of motivated social cognition."

Based on the abstract, though, there seems to have been no attempt to ascertain corresponding motivations that might underlie liberalism.

That First Step's a Doocy

Shorter Steve Doocy: One mustn't be rude to the brownshirts.

(H/T Rob Sica.)

Dreher's Camp

Rod Dreher unintentionally describes his own column* thus: "This is narrow-minded cant."

But now that's a slight to the narrow-minded, who at least aren't generally inclined to make shit up:

Misosophy? Or Just Malosophy?

What in God's name is an article about the Trinity doing in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy?

(Via Prosblogion.)

For Lactose Intolerance

A well-known scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian:

[The audience members at the back of the crowd are having trouble hearing the Sermon on the Mount.]

Man: I think it was, "Blessed are the cheesemakers"!

Gregory's wife: What's so special about the cheesemakers?

Gregory: Well, obviously it's not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.

This is one of my favorite Monty Python bits, for three reasons.

Giving Birthers a Wide Berth

A TPM reader makes a funny: "Isn't it awfully convenient that a man with no discernable British accent suddenly claims that he is British just after it's pointed out the the UK health system would have euthanized him as a child?"

(Background here.)