Comments on: Ad hominem worries about global justice

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:32:42 +0000

I am inclined to write a vague speculative riposte suggesting that British philosophers are too ambivalent, circumspect, and diffident to blog effectively…I always read your posts with interest, but I always end thinking, “dammit, what does the man THINK?” In any case I don’t think you should lump all us well-paid liberal Americans together like that.

Or do you regularly sport tweeds?

By: Chris Bertram

Chris Bertram — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 07:39:45 +0000

#49 I thought I’d made it clear that you aren’t welcome to comment on my posts. Any more, and you’ll get a comprehensive ban from CT as a whole.

By: Seth edenbaum

Seth edenbaum — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 05:03:39 +0000

[aeiou] I would spend all I had to save the life of someone I loved, while I would spend less on someone I was merely fond of, and maybe I'd toss some money to Oxfam for a kid somewhere. Viewed objectively all three are equally deserving, but that's not the way the world works. Also: is Tony Judt a leftist in the US but merely a liberal in London? Is liberalism rationalism and system-building, or is it cosmopolitan empiricism, and the cultivation of the flexibility required to negotiate their inevitable failure?

By: Martin James

Martin James — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 23:43:36 +0000

RMZ,

I guess I’m getting at a few different things.

The first level of absurdity is the simple hypocrisy of the mismatch between professed morals and actions. The second level of absurdity is the search for a good theory of the best morals given that we know that almost everyone is hopelessly hypocritical in action.

Whatever you call it, political science, anthropology, psychology or criminology I’m looking for a robust theory of morality and hypocrisy. Why do some people profess altruism moral and practice it, some profess it as moral and don’t practice it, some deny the morality of altruism and don’t practice it and then the positively most absurd of all (my group) those that don’t believe in it and feel horribly conflicted as they continue to practice it.

I believe that we KNOW that morality is an historical prejudice all the way down but don’t know how to function if we admit it.

By: novakant

novakant — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 23:36:33 +0000

It seems ok to notice that Hegel might have erred in finding that the local socio-political framework was what Geist was aiming at all along, and that this might represent a kind of dull parochialism on his part.

Only if shallow, sloppy and misleading readings, like Popper’s, of Hegel are ok.

By: rmz

rmz — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 23:05:37 +0000

@Martin

Well, I hope that you are right.

Unfortunately, we may be shifting the conversation away from political philosophy into political science, and as far as that is concerned, I like that discipline better when it is called anthropology.

By: Martin James

Martin James — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 22:55:57 +0000

Also, I thought everybody now agreed that belief in an impartial universal morality is about as parochial and chauvinistic as one can get.

By: rmz

rmz — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 22:52:45 +0000

@Martin

What are your criteria for absurdity and what are you getting at?

By: andthenyoufall

andthenyoufall — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 21:35:26 +0000

The one point in the original post that I don’t follow is the transcendental deduction of the hand-wringing. If we already know that position X is badly wrong, even preposterous, we might want to think about why philosopher Y held position X; and frequently, Y’s historical context will give us ample reasons to conclude “Y would say X, wouldn’t he?” However, post hoc identification of the sources of known bad ideas is very different from identifying in advance what, precisely, we would expect someone who was just blindly prejudiced to say, in order to level an ad hominem attack which convinces us that a plausible idea is wrong.

(Think about it in a Bayesian way. I know someone who is suddenly quite sick; did he catch it from someone else, or did was it something he ate? If I know for a fact that he has barely left his apartment in the last week, I deduce that it was almost certainly something that he ate. Once I know that, I can decide that of the things he ate, the mostly likely culprit is either the clams or the bread. But I can’t run this backwards in the same way; if my friend is suddenly sick, I can’t use the fact that he ate clams to prove that he didn’t catch the bug from someone else unless I can also argue that we should expect no other result from clam-eating than violent illness.)

By: Martin James

Martin James — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:45:43 +0000

The question is what kind of political philosophy explains how absurd morality/normativity/political identity is?

By: Donald Johnson

Donald Johnson — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:33:46 +0000

The best example of a well-intentioned liberal weasel is Samantha Power, who is exactly the kind of conscience-stricken guru one would expect to become famous and appear on TV pontificating about genocide and the US. She cares about genocide, but she also wants to be taken as a serious person by the foreign policy establishment , so when she writes a book on the subject she focuses mostly on our sins of omission, and not cases like East Timor, where five successive Administrations assisted Indonesia while they killed Timorese. She says nothing about the role of her friend Richard Holbrooke in the story of East Timor, though he appears elsewhere as a hero. And in the opening chapter where she summarizes her point she says (page XVII)—
” Despite graphic media coverage, American policymakers, journalists, and citizens are extremely slow to muster the imagination needed to reckon with evil. Ahead of the killings, they assume rational actors will not inflict seemingly gratuitous violence. They trust in good faith negotiations and traditional diplomacy. Once the killings start, they assume that civilians who keep their heads down will be left alone. They urge ceasefires and donate humanitarian aid.”

Truly a hard-hitting critique—American policymakers are at fault because they are just too damn good for this cruel world. She should have a fine career ahead of her.

By: Katherine

Katherine — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:53:31 +0000

Like Stuart @ #34 I had heard of Christine Keeler but not of Mandy Rice-Davies. Am from (and living in) the UK, born in 1976.

Now I have, I shall use “MRD” whenever I possibly can.

By: virgil xenophon

virgil xenophon — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:47:42 +0000

djw,

Well, I’m 64, so Mandy baby was a contemporary of mine; and I’m an American, but I can tell you that the Profumo scandal played almost as big over here as it did in the U.K. One would be hard pressed to find anyone of my age who had even a nodding acquaintance with a newspaper who was not at least vaguely familiar with the scandal. Of course we are so saturated with scandal of all kinds these days 24/7/365 (Hollywood Insider, TMZ, You Tube, the web in general etc., world-wide satellite coverage and streaming video on cell phones) perhaps the likes of Mandy, Christine and John Profumo would only be a blip on the radar.

By: Phil

Phil — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:23:17 +0000

Link to Wikipedia

When the prosecuting counsel pointed out that Lord Astor denied having an affair or having even met her, she replied, “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”.

By: harry b

harry b — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:22:02 +0000

Also, Chris, if it makes you feel better, I find the arguments for a more moderate view of the kind that you, Dick Miller, etc, hold quite hard to refute, but I still believe you’re all wrong, and have a much more radically egalitarian (and inconvenient for me) view: one that I would struggle to defend if I tried.