Author: Lee M.

Which Christian Theologian Are You?

A creation of Henderson

Sounds about right…

“The basic right not to be treated as a thing is the minimal condition for membership in the moral community. This is the one right we all agree is inalienable; you can get greater protection, but if you are going to be a member of the moral community–if you are not going to be a thing that has no protected interests–then you cannot get less protection than this right affords. If you are a thing, then you have no rights at all, and your value can be determined exclusively and completely by someone else–and that person is your owner.” — Gary L. Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?

Here’s a nifty little article at Tech Central Station arguing that we’ll inevitably see a cinematic remake of The Lord of the Rings:

 

Star Wars could be remade, but the story could only be retold — not re-imagined. Cinematically, there is nothing more to the Star Wars world beyond what George Lucas has chosen to show us. Star Wars offers no themes to balance, no nuances to explore, and no room for a director to craft a new vision. A remake could only imitate the original. It could not create, but only re-create.

 

By contrast, a remake of LOTR could be art. Tolkien’s novels teem over with themes, motifs, and plot notes that a thoughtful director could explore in ways that Peter Jackson didn’t. For example: my favorite aspect of the LOTR novels is the pervasive and melancholy sense of loss that permeates every page. All the wise characters realize that the world they knew is slipping away, and even victory cannot prevent the great ships from sailing into the West. The heroes fight less for their own dying world than for a world yet to come; strength and vitality ebb from all things great and marvelous, and the stain of evil is not easily erased, if indeed it is erased at all. Jackson touches only lightly upon this dolorous theme; a different director could make that theme the center of the movie, thus changing the trilogy completely. Then again, one could imagine a lighter, more childlike LOTR told from the point-of-view of the Hobbits — or a LOTR that focuses more explicitly upon the religious overtones of the novels — or a LOTR told from the perspective of the One Ring itself. One LOTR trilogy cannot come close to telling the story in every way that it can and should be told.

 

Hey, I can certainly get behind a new LOTR trilogy every ten years or so…

Josh Claybourn has a “Christian libertarian” take on the apparently now-deceased Federal Marriage Amendment:

At the root of Christian libertarianism is the biblical conviction that God grants men the freedom (never the permission) to sin. It allows Christians to transform the culture through the church and the family. This transformation is no business of the state’s. The early Christian church, and America’s Founders, saw this and kept the church and state in two different spheres, permitting the church to influence the populace (and the state) freely. The church best flourishes in that sort of environment. The virtuous life cannot be brought about by government.

I would add that the Christian emphasis on humankind’s proneness to sin also speaks in favor of limiting state power (it speaks in favor of limiting economic and social power too; balancing these is the trick).

As C.S. Lewis put it:

I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments.

Bill Vallicella at Maverick Philosopher posts an excerpt from the 1942 George Orwell essay “Pacifism and the War” (link via Bill at Bill’s Comments) in which Orwell accuses the pacifists of his day of being “objectively pro-fascist.”

Orwell writes:

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.

Now, there are (at least) two kinds of pacifists. Some pacifists believe that non-violence will, on balance, bring about better consequences than violence. According to this view, non-violent means stand a better chance of achieving our objectives than violent ones, and without the costs associated with violence. These are the kinds of pacifists that Orwell derisively (and accurately, for all I know) characterizes as believing “that one can somehow ‘overcome’ the German army by lying on one’s back.”

Whether or not pacifism “works” in this sense is an empirical question that will, presumably, have different answers in different situations. Did the pacifism of Ghandi and Martin Luther King “work”? Would violent methods have been preferable? Would non-violent methods have “worked” against the German army?

Putting this question to one side, there is another form of pacifism, the kind of pacifism that holds that violence is wrong irrespective of the consequences. For this kind of pacifist, it is worse to be guilty of committing violence than to have violence committed against oneself (it is, obviously, possible to simultaneously hold that pacifism is right and it will work better than force). This kind of pacifism accepts, in principle, that pacifism might not “work,” but that it is nevertheless right.

So, is this kind of pacifism “objectively pro-Fascist”? That is, is it responsible for hindering a just cause, and therefore deplorable? Well, if it is, then it seems to me that the same could be said of just war theory. After all, just war theory, in its classic form, holds that there are certain jus in bello criteria (criteria for the just prosecution of a war) that cannot be violated, no matter how expedient it might be to do so. For instance, it is usually held by theorists of just war that it is always wrong to intentionally target civilians (not that this has stopped many governments from doing just that). But, clearly, there are cases where a war effort would be hindered by refraining from targeting civilians. So, is just war theory also “objectively pro-Fascist”? (or “objectively pro-Communist,” “objectively pro-Islamist,” etc.)

Necessarily, moral rules restrain our actions. So long as we recognize these restraints, there is always the possibility they will conflict with our goals. Even a good cause does not, at least according to most moral theories, give us carte blanche in pursuing victory. Pacifism and just war ethics agree that committing a grave evil is worse than even defeat.

Bill of Bill’s Comments has also graciously linked to this humble site. I’m hoping to put together the beginnings of a blogroll sometime this week, of which Bill and Keith will be charter members.

to Keith Burgess-Jackson for kindly mentioning this site at his blog Anal Philosopher. He offers an eclectic mix of, among other things, animal rights, philosophy, and conservative politics. He also runs two other “boutique” blogs: Animal Ethics and The Ethics of War (which are exactly what they sound like). Good reads all.

“I propose that voting, like cheering at a football game or sending a get-well card, should be understood as primarily an expressive rather than an instrumental activity. One votes for Alfred E. Neuman rather than Pat Paulsen as an act of expressing support for Neuman rather than as a deliberate attempt to raise the likelihood of Neuman’s victory. Rational individuals will indeed vote provided that the value they assign to the expressive returns obtained through a vote is greater than the costs thereby incurred. Despite the exceedingly remote chance of swinging the election, voting is as rational as attending football games and cheering lustily for one’s team (and sitting out an election is as rational as spending one’s Saturday gardening if one prefers flowers to football).” — Loren E. Lomasky, “The Booth and Consequences: Do Voters Get What They Want?”

(link via Gene Healy)

Occasionally I will suggest to friends and acquaintances (from somewhat puckish motives I have to admit) that they shouldn’t vote, or at the very least that it doesn’t matter whether they vote or not, or who they vote for, especially in large (national or state-wide) elections.

My reasoning is fairly simple: whether you vote or not will make no difference to the outcome of the election. Suppose you vote for candidate X and she receives 5,497,385 votes while candidate Y receives 5,326,792 votes. Now suppose you hadn’t voted at all. Candidate X would’ve won by 170,592 votes instead of 170,593 votes. Wow! Your vote really counts! (For simplicity’s sake, I’ll ignore the fact that in the U.S. there are no truly national elections. In the case of presidential races we all vote in statewide elections, which then determine which candidate the state’s electors vote for. But the point stands.)

Even in those (extremely rare) cases such as in the presidential election in 2000 where the margin is relatively small, it still never comes within spitting distance of a single vote. And, as we saw, as the margin of victory approaches a small number of votes, the chance that the election will be decided in a courtroom rather than the voting booth increases significantly.

But wait, some will say (if there was anyone reading this), what if everyone acted like that? Then no one would vote and where would we be??

The intuition underlying this protest is that we ought to act in such a way (at least, in so far as our moral duties are concerned) that we would want anyone (or everyone) to act in circumstances that were relevantly similar. Philosophers call this the “universalizability principle” (hereafter, UP). As Kant put it, we should act in such a way that the maxim guiding our action can consistently be willed as a universal law.

If this is right, then I should refrain from voting only if I am willing to say that everyone else should do the same. Since I’m not willing to say this (because it would spell the end of democratic governance, which I regard as a good thing), I should not refrain from voting, nor should I advocate that others refrain from voting. Q.E.D., right?

Well, I’m hesitant to embrace this conclusion, because it seems to me that we can use similar reasoning to proscribe other kinds of voting behavior – kinds of behavior that most people would, intuitively, regard as perfectly acceptable, even commendable.

Take, for instance, third-party voting. Many people vote for third-party candidates, not because they actually want their candidate to win, but because they want to “send a message” of dissatisfaction with one or both of the major parties. Maybe it’s because the major parties are not addressing some issue they deem important, or because they want one of the major parties to move further to the right or left, or whatever. I imagine there are people who voted for Ralph Nader or Harry Browne in 2000, not because they wanted either of those esteemed gentlemen to actually become president, but because they wanted to send a message of protest to the Democrats and/or Republicans (this is not to deny that there were people who voted for Nader or Browne who did want them to become president; I’m just stipulating that there was some sub-set of third party voters who were voting primarily to send a message, not because they wanted their guy to win).

But, if we apply UP, it looks like these third-party voters are behaving irrationally or immorally, just like someone who refrains from voting altogether. After all, by hypothesis, these folks didn’t want the candidate they voted for to win. But, according to UP, one should always act in such a way that one would will everyone to act. So, in voting for a candidate they didn’t actually want to win, they are running afoul of this principle, since if everyone voted as they did, their candidate would have, in fact, won.

Now, that might not seem so bad, since you can always say that, yeah, you should only vote for the guy you really want to win. But it gets worse. It looks like we can get an even more counterintuitive result when we apply UP to voting for someone whom we actually want to win. Suppose I really and truly in my heart of hearts want John Kerry to win the upcoming election and so I vote accordingly. Now, according to UP, I should be willing to say that everyone should vote for John Kerry, since that’s what I think is best all things considered.

But I’m not so sure I’m willing to say this. Even if I want John Kerry to win, would I want everyone to vote for him? Wouldn’t that create a situation in which the winner had an overwhelming (unanimous!) mandate, and couldn’t that lead to him running roughshod over all opposition? The problem with this is that I think a vigorous opposition is essential to a healthy democracy, so I want there to be a significant amount of support for the opposition party in any given election. But this means that I can’t will that everyone act as I do in voting for John Kerry, even if I want Kerry to win. So that means that I shouldn’t vote for Kerry, even if I want him to win!*

The upshot of this is that it looks like the consistent application of UP rules out not only abstaining from voting, but also voting for any candidate unless you want him or her to win with 100% of the vote. This suggests, to me anyway, that UP may not be the self-evident principle it has often been taken to be, since it seems to lead to some extremely counter-intuitive conclusions. But, if we reject UP, then at least one argument against non-voting appears to be without foundation.

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*Now, there may be fanatical party loyalists who think that a 100% vote tally for their guy would be just dandy, but I take it as nearly self-evident that, other things being equal, a one-party state is a bad thing.

“There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.” – C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity