A Thinking Reed

Category: Philosophy

  • No rights without duties?

    A surprisingly common argument against animal rights goes like this: only beings capable of exercising moral choice and reasoning have rights. Animals don’t exercise moral choice and reasoning (i.e. they aren’t “moral agents”). Therefore animals don’t have rights.

    I say that the frequency with which this argument is made is surprising because it implicitly denies something that most of us, I think, believe, namely that there are certain human beings who have moral rights who aren’t necessarily moral agents. Infants, children, the severely mentally handicapped, the brain damaged and comatose, and people with severe Alzheimer’s are, almost certainly in some cases and quite probably in others, incapable of moral reasoning and choice, and yet no one (or hardly anyone) is willing to bite the bullet and say that these classes of human beings have no moral rights. In fact, I suspect that most of us would find the denial of moral rights to any or all of these classes of people to be morally monstrous.

    So, it’s hard to see why being a moral agent should be taken to be a necessary condition for being a moral patient, or an object of moral concern. No one proposes that we can treat, say, an infant any way we wish simply because he or she isn’t capable of moral reasoning and choice. It may be that being a moral agent is a sufficient condition for being a moral patient, but I’m hard pressed to see any reason why it should be necessary.

    I wonder if the roots of this argument lie in a kind of “contractualist” way of thinking about morality. That is, morality is seen as a kind of contract or bargain into which people enter in order to establish mutually beneficial rules of conduct. If that’s what morality was, then you could see the plausibility of holding that only moral agents had moral rights, since they’d be the only ones capable of entering into such a contract.

    But it’s pretty clear that’s not what morality is like, at least if we don’t want to abandon deeply held beliefs about the duties owed to infants, children, the mentally handicapped, etc. Contractualism has a very hard time making sense of moral duties that go beyond what self-interested rational agents have, or would agree to.

    A better criterion of who counts morally, far more plausible than the capacity for moral agency, is the capacity for experience. That is, the possibility that one’s life can go better or worse for oneself. Rocks don’t count morally because things can’t go better or worse for a rock. But things can certainly go better or worse for a chimpanzee, a pig, a chicken, a trout, and quite possibly a grasshopper. There’s no particular reason why the pain of an adult human being considered simply in itself should count for more than the the pain of an infant, or an animal, other things being equal. And there’s certainly no good reason why the fact that a being lacks the capacity for moral reasoning should entail that we can treat it in any way whatsoever, that anything goes.

    It doesn’t follow from this that animals would have all the same rights as human beings (a right to education, say, or health care, or subsidized museums). This is because, as philosopher Mark Rowlands has pointed out, they have no interests in such things. But they do have interests in things like not suffering, not being killed, and so on, and it’s not at all clear why those interests should be utterly disregarded for the mere convenience of human beings, as they often are.

  • Up from atheism

    Warning: lengthy post ahead!

    I first became a professed atheist at about age 15; I decided that I had seen through all the illusions of those around me, those unthinking, dogmatic, hypocritical, narrow-minded small-town types I had grown up with. I literally announced to my parents that I would no longer be attending church (I had been baptized in a Reformed congregation and my family had attended both a Presbyterian and a Methodist church at various times during my childhood) and that I didn’t believe all that stuff.

    It’s always difficult to really understand why we do anything, I think, and this was no exception. In retrospect I think I was a pretty smart kid who wanted to rebel in some way. Not that I was particularly “rebellious” in any conventional sense: in high school I never drank alcohol or did drugs, and I only had one girlfriend for most of that time. My preferred forms of rebellion were musical (heavy metal, punk rock, angry political rap), sartorial (combat boots, Ramones t-shirt, partly shaved head), and intellectual (atheism, and an adolescent form of general anti-authoritarianism – I remember a friend and I mocking the pro (first) Gulf War propaganda we were fed daily by the in-class “news” program Channel 1). Even “bad” kids – the kind that hung out at the guard rail at the edge of the school parking lot in their Ozzy t-shirts smoking cigarettes – were shocked by open professions of atheism.

    What religious formation I’d had was fairly lukewarm. As I mentioned, the churches we attended were mainline Protestant, but of a fairly staid and traditional stripe. I went to Sunday school at Hillside Presbyterian, sat through what seemed to me like interminable sermons, and went to Vacation Bible School in the summers. I have no tales of fundamentalist horrors; it was the kind of innocuous, respectable mainstream Protestantism that seems to be largely disappearing (for better or worse) in our polarized age. Or at least that’s how I remember it. So, this was no grand gesture of rebellion against a stultifying and oppressive upbringing.

    Anyway, atheism fit with my overall self-image. I liked to think of myself as being more reflective and critical than my peers. I used to no doubt bore my girlfriend to tears with my pontifications on why religion was bunk (too bad there were no blogs then; the poor girl might’ve been spared). I even got into hot water with her parents for (according to them) turning her against religion! (Ironically, the Lutheran Church her family attended is one I now periodically worship at when visiting home.) In high school English I read Joyce, Thoreau, and Huxley and identified with their nonconformist ethos. By senior year I was proudly brandishing my copy of Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ (whether I understood it is another matter). I can only assume that I was pretty insufferable at times.

    By the time I got to college at a state university in northwestern Pennsylvania I was confirmed in my atheism. It simply hadn’t ocurred to me at this point that there was really anything to be said for religion: religion weighed people down with guilt and irrational prohibitions on essentially harmless activities, and it was based on an intellectually unsupportable edifice.

    My first year of college I majored in art. I had aspirations of being an illustrator, maybe even drawing comic books (I was a comic geek from way back). But by the end of my freshman year I was having second thoughts. I had some really good friends who were English majors, and I flirted with switching over, but I had also taken an intro to philosophy course, and that hooked me. Althought the course focused almost entirely on Marxism(!) I was intrigued by the idea of wrestling with the great problems of meaning and existence. By sophomore year I was enrolled as a philosophy major.

    I imagine that many people’s idea of philosophy is that, if anything, it’s likely to turn people against religion. But in my case, as I read Plato, Augustine, the Bhagavad-Gita, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, William James, Charles Hartshorne, Paul Tillich, Miguel de Unamuno, Nikolai Berdyaev, Jacques Maritain, Josiah Royce, Pascal, C.S. Lewis, and a host of others I became less and less convinced that only fools and ignoramuses could believe in a world beyond this one. You may reply that this is a lesson that any normal person would naturally learn as they mature, but I can be a little thick.

    I wish I could say I had an “Aha!” moment where I suddenly became convinced that God exists. Or that I had discovered the one knock-down argument that would convince all rational people of the reality of the divine. Alas, no such luck (though, I did for a brief period of time think that Charles Hartshorne’s version of the ontological argument was sound; I still think there’s something to that…). But what now seems just as important was that I came to see religious belief as something far more substantial and worthy of consideration than my condescending adolescent caricatures would’ve led me to believe. What I thought were knock-down objections turned out to be problems that believers had been considering for hundreds of years and had developed sophisticated responses to. And, moreover, materialistic naturalism, I now started to realize, was far from being a problem-free worldview. Was it able to account for mind, purpose, and value? For the existence and order of the universe itself?

    I had also been impressed by the tradition that I associate with Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Pascal, Kierkegaard and others that emphasizes the limitations of our ability to adequately grasp the truth due to our finitude and sin. This is necessary, I think, to balance an overconfident rationalism or dogmatism. All our worldviews have limitations and it’s not obvious that one is demonstrably superior to all the others. The western theistic tradition at it’s best seems to balance the need for confident assertion with the recognition of mystery.

    This is what you might call the “negative” value of philosophy for faith. It can clear away intellectual obstacles to belief, even if it can’t create faith. For me, at least, that was an important step. Though still not a believer, I’d become convinced that the claims of religion were at least worth investigating further.

    I should note that during this entire time I hadn’t set foot in a church for any reason except maybe for the odd wedding. The first time I spent any considerable time in church as an adult came during a trip to England and Ireland during the summer before my senior year in college. As someone from a doughty Protestant background, this was really my first exposure to the beauty of traditional Catholicism. In Dublin I saw the Book of Kells on display at Trinity College and visited Christ Church and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Although I didn’t worship as such, I was moved in a way I didn’t expect and made aware of the experiential and aesthetic aspects of religion that I had previously ignored. This was only a small part of the trip, but it made an impact on me.

    By the time I left college I had moved firmly into agnosticism (if you can be firmly agnostic!). After a year of work I pursued graduate studies in philosophy at Purdue University in Indiana. I had at least a vague idea that I was interested in philosophy of religion, but took several courses in historical philosophy, delving more deeply into the medievals and the early moderns in particular, as well as 20th century analytic philosophy.

    The kind of philosophy I was being trained in combined analytical rigor with a close attention to historical texts. In other words, I was taught that we can’t dismiss someone just because they lived a long time ago (“the democracy of the dead” in Chesterton’s words) and that we should take their arguments seriously, not just read them as historical curiosities. I struggled with Augustine on free will, St. Thomas on God’s existence, Aristotle and Leibniz on ontology, and Moore and Wittgenstein on knowledge. I was fortunate to be taught by some incredibly sharp people, and, in a few cases, people who were also professing Christians. This challenged me both to become more rigorous in my thinking and to take Christian theism seriously as a live option.

    Again without any major ephiphanies I gradually became convinced that something like classical theism was the best metaphysics going. It just seemed (and seems) to me like the most satisfying explanation for the existence and order of the universe, the fact that we have minds and they find the world intelligible, the existence of truth, beauty, and goodness, our moral aspirations, the occurrence of well-attested religious and mystical experience and the holiness of the saints of all traditions. Not that it doesn’t have its problems, but it seems to me to have fewer problems than its main rivals. T.S. Eliot once reputedly said that he embraced Christianity because it was the least false of the options available to him. I wouldn’t go that far, but there’s definitely an element of skepticism and, hopefully, humility in my embrace of Christian theism.

    This all sounds very intellectualisitic, and I don’t mean to give the impression that I spent every minute of my twenties pondering the imponderables (though I guess as a philosophy student that was part of my job description.). I can’t really say what sort of other things were going on in my life that might’ve affected my thought processes, though undoubtedly personal factors played an important role.

    I had experimented with going to church on a couple of occassions in the late 90s, but it never really took. In fact, it wasn’t until shortly before my wedding (in the winter of 2000) that I began to attend church regularly, and this largely out of obligation. At that time I probably would’ve described myself as a kind of theistic Platonist, but not a Christian. But it turned out that, at least in my case, there was something to Pascal’s advice to “Bless yourself with holy water, have Masses said, and so on; by a simple and natural process this will make you believe, and will dull you – will quiet your proudly critical intellect.” I’d probably put it differently, but the simple discipline of going to church week in and week out gradually had an affect on me.

    Sometime in 2001, precipitated in part by a serious medical issue in the life of a friend, I realized that I believed that Jesus is the Son of God and went into a church near the office where I worked and prayed to him. It wasn’t quite the classic “sinner’s prayer” moment, but I would call it a conversion experience, with the caveat that a lot of groundwork had been laid. In some ways I guess it was an explicit acknowledgement of something that had been going on under surface for some time.

    Since then my religious life has been pretty much bereft of dramatic incident. I’ve attended various Lutheran churches over the course of the last five years up until this past summer when, having just moved to Boston, my wife and I began attending the Church of the Advent (Episcopal). Lutheranism at its best seems to me to combine catholicity of doctrine and worship with the Augustinian understanding of finitude, sin, and grace that comports so well with my skepticism. In doctrinal matters I’m pretty conventional: I don’t have much of an itch for revisionism in Christology or the doctrine of the Trinity (Chalcedon and Nicea sit just fine with me), Atonement (I think some combination of Anselm and Abelard is probably as close to the truth as we’re likely to get), or other doctrinal matters. If anything, the challenge for me now is to rest in the faith of the church and get down to the business of actually living a Christian life. Thinking about religion, however necessary and important, can be a temptation to neglect things like prayer, service, doing justice and loving mercy, developing the virtues of faith, hope, and charity – those sorts of things.

  • Plantinga on Dawkins and Calvinism and (vs?) philosophy

    Alvin Plantinga, probably the most important contemporary Christian philosopher working in the analytic tradition, has a lengthy review of Dawkins’ God Delusion.

    I have to say that I have almost no appetite for these back-and-forth polemics; I was an atheist for a considerable period of time and don’t feel much need to revisit it. But you always learn something from reading Plantinga. Here he deploys his trademark self-refutation argument against naturalism, an argument which I think has a good deal to be said for it (C.S. Lewis famously deployed a similar argument in his book Miracles, as did Stephen R.L. Clark in his Gifford Lectures).

    Also of interest to the philosophically-inclined, there’ve been a series of discussions on the Generous Orthodoxy: Thinktank site about theologians and theistic philosophers, specifically about why the latter don’t seem attracted to the Calvinism that’s making something of a resurgence in evangelical circles. In particular, most analytic philosophers who are theists, even ones from Reformed backgrounds (like, say, Alvin Plantinga), defend libertarian views of free will, which is at odds with the traditional Calvinist view. It’s interesting to see the different ways in which philosophers and theologians approach these issues.

  • Animal cloning and "granting things their space"

    I don’t suppose it’ll come as a surprise to anyone who reads this blog that I think that cloning animals for meat and milk is a bad idea. Leaving aside the health considerations, what bothers me is that it’s one more step in reducing animals (and, by implication, the rest of nature) to the status of commodities or resources which are entirely at our disposal. Animals are viewed as raw material to whom anything can be done in order to increase their productivity (and the profits that generates). Cloning is one more step away from the semi-mythical idyllic family farm toward the complete mechanization and industrialization of animal husbandry.

    In his interesting book Animals Like Us, philosopher Mark Rowlands argues that this instrumentalist view of animals (and nature) has implications in the way we treat other human beings. Seeing the world around us as fundamentally a resource for our use has a “spillover” effect in our perceptions of the value of persons. “This is the logical culmination of the resource-based view of nature: humans are part of nature, and therefore humans are resources too. And whenever something – human or otherwise – is viewed primarily as a resource, things generally don’t go well for it” (p. 196)

    It’s hard not to see similarities in the application of cloning to the meat industry and the application of similar technologies to human beings. Embryos – i.e. nascent human life – are turned into a commodity to be used either for reproductive technologies or for scientific research. Lauadable as the goals of some of these enterprises may be, the instrumentalization of human life is disturbing. And one of the reasons it’s so disturbing is that we have a hard time articulating why we find these sorts of things disturbing. Our public language of costs and benefits doesn’t incorporate values that may transcend the starkly utilitarian. Satifsying people’s felt needs (e.g. for cheaper meat; or, perhaps more accurately, for greater meat industry profits) without creating tangible harm to people’s health is all the government spokesmen permit themselves to be concerned with.

    This doesn’t mean that I think we should embrace the views of some extreme environmentalists that human beings have no special worth, or that it’s wrong for us to use nature for our benefit. I think a recovery of the sense of the natural world as God’s good creation would, if taken seriously, go a long way toward creating a more humble approach to our dealings with nature. For instance, we might come to see animals as having their own role in God’s providential ordering of the world, beyond being things which exist solely for our use. There are tantalizing hints in the Bible of God having a covenant, not just with human beings, but with all flesh (cf. Genesis 9)

    Expanding on this in his article “The Covenant with all Living Creatures,” philosopher Stephen R.L. Clark (about whose political philosophy I blogged a bit the other day) argues for taking the idea of just such a covenant seriously. Clark concludes:

    The covenant God made, we are told, in the beginning and affirmed since then, is to grant all things their space. `The mere fact that we exist proves his infinite and eternal love, for from all eternity he chose us from among an infinite number of possible beings’. Every thing we meet is also chosen: that is a good enough reason not to despise or hurt it.

    By “grant[ing] all things their space,” Clark means, among other things, allowing them to live “according to their kind.” This requires us to recognize that animals have their own telos, under God, that may be quite independent of our interests. To clone animals in order to make them “better” from the point of view of our purposes is, it seems to me, a pretty clear example of refusing to grant them their space.

  • Stephen R.L. Clark’s "anarcho-conservatism"

    I’m on vacation, visiting the wife’s ancestral homeland of Indiana. Blessedly free of online distractions for the most part. Hence the relative dearth of posting.

    But I have been reading a really interesting book by philosopher Stephen R.L. Clark called The Political Animal: Biology, Ethics, and Politics. Clark has written on a variety of topics, from animal rights to natural theology. He seems to be a Christian Platonist of some sort, but also with a strong bent toward understanding human beings as parts of nature and continuous in a strong sense with other animals.

    The present work attempts to look at political and ethical issues in light of seeing human beings as quite literally political animals. Clark arrives at what he calls “Aristotelian anarchism.” Contrary to the Hobbesian view that posits the necessity of a strong state to keep us from a perpetual state of war, Clark’s Aristotelianism sees humans as social animals who naturally form communities.

    Hobbesians, including most modern liberals, justify the state on the ground that it is what ideally stiuated rational agents would choose. But this, Clark thinks, masks the fact that the state is essentially brigandage writ large. No one actually consents to the existence of rule by the few over the many, in any sense that would seem to be morally significant. And when political philosophers argue that they would choose it if they were “truly rational,” what they often seem to mean by “rational” is “good liberals like us.”

    Of course, even if the state isn’t legitimate in the sense that any of us have ever actually consented to being ruled by other men, the ever-present fear is that it’s the only thing that stands between us and social chaos. Besides the obvious point that, given the historical record of governments in terms of murder, theft, and oppression, the cure may well be worse than the disease, Clark points out that state power may yet be intrinsically wrong:

    No one is to enslave anyone, nor coerce anyone except to prevent such enslavement or absolute coercion. No one, in particular, is to force another to do what he/she does not him/herself consider right: that is, to treat another source of action merely as material. … State power is born in conquest, not in free contract, and has no more right to its prey than any other robber band. (p. 33)

    The statist assumption is that top-down control is the only means of establishing social harmony, but the anarchist’s claim is that the “peace” provided by coercion is actually just war in another form, and that, moreover, there are other means by which social order arises.

    Like other anarchists, Clark distinguishes two means of securing social cooperation: the military (or political) means, and the economic means. The former uses coercion to compel behavior and its use tends to result in a caste of rulers who lord it over the rest of us. The latter includes free exchange, gift-giving, and other positive-sum forms of social interaction. The anarchist’s political agenda, Clark says, is not to impose some utopian blueprint for the perfect society, but to replace the military means of civil association with non-coercive methods.

    Non-coercive anarchism (which is to say, just anarchism) rests … upon a method of civil association, not on a perceived goal. That method, the organization of the civil means, has no one obvious outcome, and to that extent the critics are correct to see that anarchists have no definite political goal, no ‘good society’ the far side of catastrophe. Certain possible futures are rejected (as imperial consolidation, bureaucratic world state, military nationalism), but the anarchist methodology is compatible with as many more, including the free market, communitarian federalism and even ‘fractured feudalism’ [i.e. competing and partly overlapping sources of authority]…. (p. 86)

    Following Jefferson and Kropotkin, Clark seems to favor a decentralization of political power to the most local feasible level. He rejects, however, revolution as a means to replacing the military or political form of association with peaceful and non-coercive methods. Even Gandhi’s “non-violent” revolution, he points out, resulted in no small amount of bloodshed, and the Indian state that replaced British colonialism arguably suppressed liberty in a number of ways, not the least of which being the incorporation of unwilling minorities into the Indian state.

    Instead, Clark adopts what he calls “anarcho-conservatism,” an anti-revolutionary commitment to expanding the organization of the civil or economic means of social cooperation, side-by-side with, and gradually replacing coercive means. He concedes that such a conservative stance risks being insufficiently sensitive to present injustice, but argues that change which grows organically out of a people’s past is preferable to the kind of sharp break with it that revolution often brings.
    Nevertheless, he admits that the anarcho-conservative requires a certain kind of patience:

    and that may be easiest for those who can trust in God. If the God of justice will bring the Empire down, and we, God’s people, will be there to see it fall (even if I, in this mortal body, never do), we can afford to wait, and not attempt to rule the world by force. (p. 90)

    This last quote reminds me of John Howard Yoder’s argument that Christians aren’t called to make sure that history comes out right. That’s God’s business. The job of Christians is to be faithful to a certain way of life in the midst of the dawning of the new creation and the death-throes of the old. And certainly non-coercion looms large in Yoder’s vision of what the Christian life is about.

    Clark does recognize that there can be a just war, but he sees this as essentially a defensive action, and not one that should be resorted to in order to bring in some glorious new social order. And, in fact, the support of wars or revolutions is so inherently dangerous to the preservation of the civil means of order, they require a very high degree of justification:

    Just revolutions, in sum, are theoretically possible, on the same terms as just wars. But there is very strong reason to be suspicious of any candidates for that high status. Certainly neither war nor revolution can be just that does not revert as soon as possible to the civil means, to peace. Certainly the very establishment of a war machine will almost always make that return less likely. The means constitute and modify the end, as Gandhi saw. All would-be revolutionaries need to ask themselves which programme is likelier to succeed: armed revolution, with its ensuing injuries to innocents, its creation of another brigand power, or else some unsung, unrebellious organisation of the civil and economic means alongside or out of the way of politics? (p.88)

    I think this is key to the argument. Attending to the means, not just the ends, however laudable, we’re seeking to realize, is necessary for any just social order. Politics often adverts to ends-justifies-the means reasoning. But the anarchist, like the pacifist, is the fly in the ointment, reminding us to scrutinize the means we choose. It’s much easier, in some ways, to coerce people than to earn their free consent. But treating them as ends in themselves, rather than material for our schemes, demands it.

  • Blessed Spinoza

    Hillary Putnam reviews a new book on Spinoza in the New York Observer.

    I have a longstanding fascination with Spinoza. As an undergrad I became obsessed with his writing and all the secondary literature I could get my hands on. Harry Austryn Wolfson’s book in particular (which sadly appears to be out of print) was very helpful to me in connecting his thought to ancient and medieval philosophy, especially certain forms of neoPlatonism.

    Spinoza offered an entire system – a metaphysics, an epistemology, and an ethics, that in a lot of ways harked back to the ancient view of philosophy as a way of life. He was both a mystic – or a “God intoxicated” man as he has been called – and an arch rationalist, putting his philosphy into the form of a geometric-style proof. He pioneered a “historical critical” approach to the Bible and was accused of being an atheist and freethinker, ultimately being expelled from his Jewish community. But he was also described as “saintly,” making a simple living grinding lenses while he worked on his philosophy (and ultimately leading to his untimely death through the inhalation of glass dust!).

    While no traditional theist can accept Spinoza’s conclusions, I think his attempt to purge god-talk of anthropomorphic concepts is an example of the useful corrective that “negative” theology can often offer.

  • A Marxist defends God

    Terry Eagleton lays the smack down on Richard Dawkins (via Brandon). The influence of Herbert McCabe, O.P., one of Eagleton’s friends and mentors, really comes through here.

    In his book After Theory, Eagleton even argues for a kind of Thomistic Aristotelianism as a philosophical foundation for left-wing politics and an alternative to postmodernist nihilism (See Paul Griffiths’ review here).

  • Is our atheists learning?

    Thomas wonders why high profile atheist provocateurs like Richard Dawkins seem to know so little about the religions they criticize and frequently traffic in straw-man arguments. He also excerpts a take down of Dawkins’ latest book by agnostic Thomas Nagel.*

    Scientific popularizers like Dawkins often seem to think that their expertise in one field translates into a general expertise about broader philosophical issues. Not that nonspecialists should be forbidden from discussing these things (among other things that would rapidly put most blogs, including this one, out of business), but there is still an obligation to familiarize oneself with the arguments of the field one is wading into.

    For instance, a recent interview with Dawkins gave me the impression that he thinks that the history of religious belief is neatly dividable into the pre-Darwin era where most people believed in God based on some version of the argument from design, and a post-Darwin one where theology is shown to be intellectually bankrupt. This evidences a profound ignorance of the history of philosophical theology. If anything, theism has made a remarkable comeback in the last few decades in philosophical circles.

    Unfortunately, Dawkins is able to impress people with his status as a member of the high Priesthood of Science. And his bombastic pronouncements drown out more nuanced thinkers like Michael Ruse. Ruse and Nagel, though nonbelievers, recognize that matters aren’t as clear-cut as Dawkins would have them and that well-informed intelligent people are to be found on all sides of the debate.
    —————————————
    *I discussed Nagel’s The Last Word here and here.

  • Double effect double standard

    This post by the Bull Moose blogger (via Marvin) brings to mind a point made by Robert Holmes in his excellent On War and Morality (I don’t have the book in front of me, so I may not get all the details right).

    Pacifists and anti-interventionists are often criticized for their unwillingness to take up arms in the defense of the innocent. According to interventionists, the blood of those innocents is on their hands.

    However, Holmes points out, interventionists usually deny that they are morally responsible for the innocent lives lost in the course of waging war. But how, he asks, can they fail to be responsible for the deaths of people they actually kill, while pacifists are held responsible for the deaths of people they had no part in killing?

    In other words, if double effect is sufficient to get the “warist” off the hook for the innocent deaths the war he supports causes, it should be more than sufficient to get the pacifist off the hook for the deaths he merely fails to prevent by refusing to wage (or support) war.

    This doesn’t show whether, say, intervention in Darfur would be on balance a good or bad idea, but it would be nice if interventionists canned the self-righteousness.

  • "String conjecture"?

    Thomas at Without Authority, himself an honest-to-goodness scientist, points us to this article from Gregg Easterbrook about a new book arguing that string theory isn’t really science, but something more like metaphysical speculation.

    I’d be the last one to claim anything more than a layman’s knowledge of current physics (at best), but it has always raised my suspicions when scientists start talking about unobservable other dimensions (or whole other universes) to account for the existence and/or specific structure of our cosmos. It starts to look like any theory, no matter how farfetched, is okay if it keeps God out.