Actually this raises another point vis-a-vis Martin’s argument: to the extent that American policy in Indochina then, or in the Middle East today, is what you describe and not what it’s presented as, it’s not popular with the American public (and still less so with other Western publics). The only way Americans can be induced to support these neo-imperialist elite projects is by having the Communist or Great Global Terrorist Menace waved in their faces. So, OK, they’re being duped—to some degree, certainly (although there really were Communist and now terrorist menaces)—but the very fact that this deception is needed attests to the progress that’s been made in de-legitimizing imperialism and military adventurism, does it not?

OK, now who gets the honor of the 200th post?

I think we actually tend to go too easy on the past and to forget just how seriously evil things really were then. The evils committed within living memory tend to loom large, though, for obvious reasons.

(Oddly, this is reversed when people talk about works of art. You hear invidious comparisons of TV drama, say, to the brilliant achievements of the Elizabethan theater, with no acknowledgement that most plays of Shakespeare’s time were absolute dreck, and even his aren’t all Hamlet. But I digress.)

On this Vietnam comparison, basically it seems to come down to a different sense of what kinds of intentionality can be assigned to the national policy-making of big, bureaucratic modern states, plus what the particular intentions were behind recent American policies, plus what difference it makes that the destructiveness has increased in scale. I still think that attacking, torturing and killing a bunch of Anabaptists—hardly the most threatening group I can think of—and justifying this on grounds that they have the wrong theology of baptism, or whatever, is different from launching attacks—however misguidedly—as part of military operations against allies of a major power, under a doctrine that requires not targeting civilians as such, even if an incidental (though foreseeable) result of those attacks, given modern tactics and firepower, is burned villages and dead civilians.

But I grant that it’s a subtle distinction at best (as all the caveats indicate), and I will say this: As a believer in progress, I think that in another three hundred years—or, God willing, much sooner—modern methods of warfighting will also look absurd and immoral in the same way that the old religious wars and Inquisition look today. I really don’t think we’re just in a big cycle here, with equally (let alone increasingly) immoral acts being committed in every age even as the issues and parties happen to change. To go back to where we started—and to a question I wish I’d posed a lot sooner, since it’s forward- rather than backward-looking—I really wonder if the people who deny or question that there’s been moral progress look at contemporary Western societies and see any serious chance that they’ll somehow evolve from what they are now into the kind of mess they were for most of the time before 1950. Does the directional arrow really point both ways? If not, then there must be a name for the stronger tendency one way, and for me that name is “progress.”

I should also add, Engels, that I don’t think the chief protagonists in your debate here (Martin in particular, and certainly Jacob) fit my characterization above: they say interesting things, and there’s historical and interpretive complexity here – thus my desire to emphasize that complexity, not the thesis against moral progress that I don’t think ultimately follows from the evidence and interpretations they present. Being charitable with interesting people you partly disagree with doesn’t strike me as being insincere or malicious.

And I read post 62 (by samchevre, esp. “the de-colonialization process in Africa and India/Pakistan has featured extremely high levels of violance and brutality” and “Loss of stabilizing social institutions isn’t necessarily a good thing”) as I described: certainly he’s rejecting a universal thesis of moral progress, but he’s also doing just what I say he’s doing (see again my ambition here to engage in charitable mining of posts for interesting claims and positions).

Martin Bento in 63, 78 and 95 are also in the ballpark of the sort of thing I had in mind.

To be clear: I’m not trying to fudge the issues at stake (although I have no doubt you’ll continue to believe that this is what I’m up to, regardless of what I say here, but alas, while I obviously am obsessive enough to defend myself this far, I simply don’t care enough to repeat myself many more times: a near-200 comment blog post reminds me too much of my old Usenet addiction).

I’m choosing the issues that interest me, and interpreting some posts in that light. You pit yourself against the forces of darkness and their muddled pomo sympathists (I enjoyed your post 150). It’s a good fight, but I personally don’t think the forces of darkness and their pomo dupes have much by way of an interesting philosophical position. So yes, I do think it’s uninteresting arguing with them, although, like fixing the basement plumbing, I suppose it has to be done, and by someone who knows what they’re doing.

I also don’t think you need unabashed universalism and strong claims about moral objectivity to make the case for generalizable and authoritative moral knowledge, and I think my roughly constructivist position, if tenable (I’m still not sure, and there are strong arguments against my tentative stance) probably has implications not only for one’s philosophy of history, but more critically the sort of philosophical questions about history that one finds interesting and/or tractable.

Clearly our interests here are in the same ballpark, but not especially convergent. Alas.

Your devotion to some mystical Moral Progress has you justifying American Imperialism, now you know how German exceptionalists felt in the 1920s.

As for this:

“My point was that the U.S. didn’t, as a matter of policy, take individual people and light them on fire using napalm, the better to illustrate for the rest of the village / country / world what the consequences would be of embracing the wrong ideas. I believe that’s what the Inquisition would have done.”

OK, but how does this compare to what the US did do? Its purpose was partly ideological, so it was attacking people for having the wrong ideas (to the extent that it was not ideological, it was simply a power struggle, which is, if anything, even less defensible. That applies to the Inquisition too, of course). It did set people on fire. The war was fought primarily to discourage other countries in the region from converting to Communism, Viet Nam itself being not of great consequence. So it was done largely for demonstrative purposes. The major difference seems to be that individuals were not singled out for their beliefs; rather villages and areas had fire rained down from the skies upon all. I don’t really see that as a moral improvement.

And if we really require positive evidence for the claim “unicorns do not exist”, can we really make the claim? What basis is there for it other than the absence of evidence to the contrary?

As for this:

“”‘moral judgments exist in the mind therefore the burden of proof is on the objectivists.””

No what I said was:

“Moral judgments exist in minds; this we know. That moral judgments have any existence or meaning independent of minds needs to be argued. Things that exist solely in minds are normally considered “subjective”. So the burden of proof rests with those who want to argue that moral judgments are objective.”

If you’re going to complain about people misrepresenting your ideas, you really should knock stuff like that off. The question is whether they exist solely in the mind. The activity that we call “the mind” does not exist solely in the mind. It can be objectively traced in considerable detail by EEGs. Tee Hee.

“Yet, I think you should stop framing the issue as a problem if you really do not think there are any moral truths. In such a world there is nothing wrong or bad with being delusional.”

This assumes strongly, as I said before, that the only problems are moral problems. Let’s apply this premise – that there is nothing wrong or bad with being delusional if there is nothing morally wrong with it – to science. By this criterion, science should evaluate theories by how they serve some set of “objective moral truths” not by whether they serve factual truth. If the moral consequences of Darwinism are bad, science should reject Darwinism. Now, whether the moral implications of Darwinism are actually bad is debatable, and will obviously rely in part on precisely which “objective moral truths” you accept, but for the argument it does not matter. Given the premise, do you accept the conclusion? With your position, I don’t see how you cannot.

In comment #180, you wrote:

“Oh really, no bad faith. Well how about this.

[quoting my comment #167]“You examine the potential consequences of wrongful skepticism of moral claims (that actual moral truth will not be followed because of our skepticism) and the consequences of wrongful belief in them, attributed to me (I suppose martin thinks it is bad in terms of the effects it would have on people). You cannot take this position and then say that consequences are irrelevant; you are arguing consequences.”

[your response in comment #180]This is in reference to my statement about consequences in post #162, were I was clearly referring to YOUR USE of consequences IN POST #161. There you seem to imply that thinking about consequences was relevant to the issue at hand or my previous examples but you did not demonstrate any relevance of even explain why you were talking about it.
”

The quote from #167 above contains ns two direct quotes, in parentheses, from your comment #158. Your comment in #158 was clearly not in response to my comment in #161, yet you responded as though it were, and accused me of bad faith for not responding to your comments in #158 as a response to #161.You attribute to me a claim that “thinking about consequences was relevant to the issue at hand or my previous examples” in the context of a bad faith accusation, which implies that this was not true. Now, you acknowledge that you were making a consequentialist argument all along and accuse me of bad faith for supposing you were so stupid as not to realize that. Speaking in good faith does not mean I have to assume you are coherent; it is your job to demonstrate that. On the current evidence, it is rather hard to maintain the position that you are even if I were inclined to assume such a thing “by default”, which, from courtesy, I am.

‘There are no moral truths’ and ‘there are moral truths’ are both positive claims. And because they are both positive claims they both need to be argued for.

Just like ‘there are no unicorns’ and ‘there are unicorns’ are also both positive claims that need to be argued for.

In a world were we do not know anything we do not accept ‘there are no unicorns’ as a default. That would be just silly. We accept ‘I do not know’ as a default. But remember you were arguing that the subjectivity people do not have a burden to show that there are no moral truths. You seem to think that until the objectivists show that there are moral truths we should work on the assumption that there aren’t any. If we are really living in a state of complete ignorance on the issue then the default should be ‘we don’t know,’ but I would say that we have enough brain power and evidence to at least start looking at the reasons for and against the idea of moral truths and leave your silly default argument behind. And by the way a default of ‘I don’t know’ does not mean that we have a clear reason to avoid moral truth claims due to risk, as explained above.

As for substantive arguments I think you said something like ‘moral judgments exist in the mind therefore the burden of proof is on the objectivists.’ Hardly a compelling positive argument, eh! (e.g. it is not obvious that something must exist independent of minds to be true, for example minds (tee hee)).

On to my use of consequences.

I was noting that in your reply when you introduced the consequences issue you did not speak to the point I was making about consequences or explain at all what you were getting at. I was simply indicating to the reader that YOUR comments on that issue lacked substance.

My use of moral consequences was simply noting that you seemed to think that there was something of a problem with advancing moral claims that were not true. I was guessing that the problem you were thinking of was an underlying moral problem that actually committed you to the idea of moral truths. But maybe the problem you have in mind is that we would be believing in things that are not true and nothing more. Yet, I think you should stop framing the issue as a problem if you really do not think there are any moral truths. In such a world there is nothing wrong or bad with being delusional.

As to bad faith, do you really think that I fail to understand consequentialism and the way I was appealing to consequences in my statement? Did you really think that when I said that the consequence stuff does not matter I was making a massive blunder that related to everything else I had said previously in the thread?

Certainly the use of napalm was a deliberate act of U.S. policy. My point was that the U.S. didn’t, as a matter of policy, take individual people and light them on fire using napalm, the better to illustrate for the rest of the village / country / world what the consequences would be of embracing the wrong ideas. I believe that’s what the Inquisition would have done. But I’ve already conceded that I think the use of napalm was a war crime, and certainly not any kind of advertisement for the virtues of modern progress.

You haven’t answered some of my other points, like the fact that Western governments, possessed of napalm or no, do not target religious minorities for extermination or forced conversion anymore. But, whatever—as I say, I think the important point here is that the question of progress involves weighing these sorts of fine-grained facts, not just glibly pronouncing the modern world a hopeless mess (which I think is what too many liberals / progressives are unreflectively inclined to do).

The enemy of our enemy was our friend. We were concerned with Vietnam and, behind them, the USSR, not with the Khmers and, behind them, China. So Nixon normalized relations with China and a powerplay ensured with Viet Nam and the USSR on one side (though the Soviets did not get too directly involved) and the US, the Khmer Rouge, and China on the other. That’s a little simple, but it was the overall alignment.

It is also worth noting that the KR leaders were, as the wikipedia article on them puts it: “were perhaps the most educated leaders in the history of Asian communism. ” They were University educated in Paris, almost to a man. Pot himself was academically mediocre, but not all of them were. So they cannot be put down as people unenlightened by modern ideas.

Likewise, I don’t see how not to attribute such things as napalm to deliberate US intentions. They were planned and approved at the highest levels, and they were done routinely. How could they be rogue actions? When you get into actual rogue actions, well, I had a housemate who had fought in Nam, and claimed he had seen a US soldier sexually violate a decapitated cadaver. I don’t think he was lying, as it was not a story he seemed particularly eager to tell. That, I grant you, is something that does not reflect the national intention, but perhaps it shows something of the psychological state the war created in modern people fundamentally like us.

But perhaps I’m wrong. I do think this at least is a productive discussion. You make some good points about Vietnam and modern war in general, and you seem to recognize that resolving the questions I’ve raised on this thread requires looking closely at historical specifics. That’s a lot more likely to lead to the truth, I think, than the kind of wholesale dismissal of the whole notion of progress that we’ve been hearing from some quarters.