I dispute this. What about torture?

21st-century intro-to-philosophy textbooks will ask whether it is alright to torture a fat man if we feel absolutely certain he will then tell us the location of a bomb which would otherwise kill n civilians. Does it matter if he was involved in the bomb planting, or merely has secondhand knowledge and is unwilling to share it? If he was the bomb-planter, or an auxiliary participant in a plot?

Not to defend Heidegger exactly, but he didn’t send anyone to the death camps, nor plan the invasion of Poland, etc. Yes, he did collaborate with vicious anti-semites and should have known better about the complexion of the Nazi movement, so naive doesn’t begin to cut it, (though we’re talking about 2 years of active involvement in, er, academic affairs, followed by withdrawal and gradual disillusionment and misgivings). However, though IIRC Hitler didn’t ever win a majority vote and his vote share actually declined, only to be engineered into office by a faction of the traditional right-wing conservatives, the new regime was met with widespread enthusiasm in many quarters of German society. Partly it was a “better dead than red” sort of thing, but also it was perceived as a revolution of national renewal, (as, indeed, e.g., economically speaking, it was at first, with “Keynesian” recovery policies). Hard as it is to put oneself into the historical context, with its pressures and conflicts, and hard as it may be to understand the mentalities and philosophical structures of the German right intellectuals, (especially if one’s never studied any of them), the idea that Nazism could be perceived as an apparent good shouldn’t be dismissed on the basis of hindsight, else one has even less explanatory grasp and insight into a baffling and horrifically unmasterable past. Prominent figures such as Jaspers or Mann, who didn’t fall for it, initially thought that Hitler was just too preposterous and would be a passing phenomenon, (as, indeed, did the very traditionalist conservatives who’d engineered him into power).

So your claims based on hindsight actually resemble the myth of the French resistance, when, in fact, most of the French were passively resigned to the occupation, (as with Sartre), or actively supported the Vichy regime and collaborated with the Nazi occupation, (as with Mitterand). It’s all well and good to appeal for resistance against great political evils, but it’s still better to attempt the effort to be clear-sighted about its possibilities.

The knock on Heidegger is less the public support of the Nazis, (however one reads tendentiously, one way or another, the dug-up facts about that involvement or his duplicitous “explanations”), but that he never apologized or recanted publicly for that episode. (As a piece of hear-say, Marcuse, who was with the O.S.S. at the time, asked Heidegger about the matter, and the latter responded that he wasn’t going to deny what had happened or pretend otherwise, and become a fawning hypocrite like those others. Marcuse, at least, chose to see a shred of “integrity” in that response). Instead, Heidegger just chose to continue on with the “original” intention of his project, with suitable re-arrangements, whether from expediency or because of the conceptual “necessity” of his path of thinking. We don’t know the state of Heidegger’s conscience behind his immense character-armor-, (since how could we?),- but it’s scarcely plausible that he was unaware of or obliviously indifferent to the immense catastrophe that had occurred and the vast suffering involved. What we do know is that, in accordance with his authoritarian-elitist mentality, he regarded the post-war democratic “order” as meretricious, (though in that, too, he was scarcely unique, as a distrust of democracy was widespread among the post-war German population).

So you’re engaging with an historical version of post hoc, propter hoc here. (Those, such as Loewith, who blamed it all on Heidegger’s historicism, are question-begging, since the recognition of the temporal finitude of human existence means or entails that we are living insuperably within historical horizons, and what then would be the alternative? A reversion to classical natural law?). What’s more, you’re engaging in the manoeuvre of “putting oneself into the right”, which is a great way to “win” an argument, but remains basically self-manipulative, for all that.

(BTW I regard both complacency and self-righteousness as vices, though hardly the worst sort).

Quiggin had spoken of falling into “moral and political confusion”, which, come to think about it, is a pretty apt characterization of the general and perennial condition of the world: if you’re not at all confused, you just haven’t been paying attention

Just to recap, the moral and political confusion I was referring to was not the generic condition of the world but the specific confusion involved in joining the Nazi Party, accepting preferment at its hands, and sending Jewish friends and colleagues on the path to the gas chambers.

Most of us are confused, but hopefully not that confused. Perhaps some of us would fail the test today, as Heidegger did then, but many resisted then and many would, I am sure, still resist today.

Well, for all that I insist on differentiating/not confusing the moral and the political, I don’t think a complete absence of confusion is an attainable, let alone an entirely desirable, condition. Quiggin had spoken of falling into “moral and political confusion”, which, come to think about it, is a pretty apt characterization of the general and perennial condition of the world: if you’re not at all confused, you just haven’t been paying attention, (since, as is well-known, attention is the natural prayer of the soul). I’ll take it you roughly understand why I insist on the “amorality” of the political, which is not the same as rampant immorality, though, Lord knows, there’s always plenty of that, too, and that I’m not eschewing any consideration of rights, but rather the republican “grounds” for construing them are different from the liberal ones, though there may be some partial overlap.

BTW there’s one point from the last head-butting, locking-of-imaginary-antlers thread that I wanted to clear up. I wasn’t “uncharitably” attributing to you an argument, but rather was making it in my own right, if apparently too implicitly: that there is no prior, call it “reason”, “rationality”, or what you will, that can guarantee one from falling into moral and political confusion, though neither you, nor I, nor any other reasonable person would fall today in the way that Heidegger did. As an example, Habermas, who’s not your bog standard liberal, but might fairly be characterized as a quasi-socialist super-liberal, supported the bombing of Serbia, because modern moral consciousness has been “disemburdened” onto modern legal structures and, of course, such legal injunctions need to be enforced, etc. Another case of a philosopher getting lost amongst the weeds of his own philosophy, rather than exercising the risks of an actual judgment. (One wonders if he’d bothered to call his former student Zoran Djindjic, to find out what he might think).

Also, since someone threw into my face gratuitously a comment of mine, from a 6/25/09 thread, on the Chris Bertram thread complaining about the hoi polloi, I did leave a query as to whether you’d ever fulfilled the promisary note you’d left at the end of that earlier thread.

Its hilarious to listen to all these tiresome, standard-issue, doctrinaire conventional liberals huff and puff about the dangers of consequentialism while they astutely ignore the beam in their own eye.

Natural rights theories are based on absolutely nothing in the real world at all. All you need is a minimally good story and next thing you know you have a right—or you don’t.

That seems perfectly possible to me. I should say that I wasn’t trying to draw you into a fight, in case it seemed that way, but was honestly interested in what you were getting at here.

The problem with that approach is that you end up spending a lot of time and effort into constructing an extreme enough edge case to satisfy the need for universality and yet more time and effort into defending your construct against critics pointing out its flaws, leaving the consideration of the principle in question as at best a secondary activity [1]. What’s more, by forcing yourself into creating such an extreme case there’s always the danger that you’re building it towards a preferred outcome—either to prove or disprove universality.

It’s like software testing. For any moderately complex piece of software it’s easy to spent a lot of time and money creating test cases that try the limits of the system, but which are rarely or never encountered “in the wild” and which say little about the more mainstream circumstances with which the software needs to work. [2]

[1] Classic science fiction example: The Cold Equations
[2] Like the financial/payment system at a Big Government Facility I know that has provisions for combinations of benefit payouts and such that are throroughly tested with each new release but have never been used in production…

Well, Holbo, when it comes to thinking about politics and the political, I’m just not a Rawlsian liberal, but rather an Arendtian republican. So I’m not much interested in a normative/descriptive. ideal theory/real theory distinction. After all, real politics is riddled with “normative” elements, however conflicted or confused. (And yes, sometimes one wishes such utter “normative” obtuseness could be stripped away, to allow for an actually functional “solution”, as with the U.S. health care debate). And Arendt’s criticism was directed at all forms of political theorizing and theoretical politics, in the name of a revived notion of Aristotelian practical reason as praxis, in a modernized frame. Her actual topic was not politics as a theorizable realm, but rather what it means to act, speak, think politically. Hence she appeals to the “ideal” of the pre-philosophical Periclean polis, analogous to and probably modeled on Heidegger’s recourse to the Pre-Socratics to get “behind” metaphysical theorizing, as a riddling device to examine and question at cross-grain modern political theories and concepts. So I take “normative political philosophy” as an effort to pre-specify political norms, whether ideally or “really”, in terms of a heuristic-fictive social contract, with a large grain of salt, as having little real efficacy, and being largely just academic. (Since academics like to think that they live in a world that is a four-square grid of mutual respect and equal freedom, instead of in that scholarly war of all against all that Hegel called the “spiritual animal kingdom”). Rawls, at any rate, strikes me as just elaborately specifying the political intuitions of the “madly for Adlai” crowd, which was the last time such liberalism was hegemonically ascendant.

As for liberalism being “panglossian”, well, I’m also a leftie, if not of a “hard” or “extreme” variety, then reasonably industrial strength, so I hardly think so. But the ancient ideal or dream of liberalism was to bring about a harmonization of all interests and values, basically privatistically/individualistically conceived, into a universal consensus governing society, as well as to harmonize political “liberty” with the market mechanism, with its own fallacious marginal product account of distribution. I suppose that could be called “panglossian”. But I’m much more inclined to think of liberalism as functioning to perpetuate inequality in the very name of equality. And to suppress (awareness of) political conflict in the name of the legitimacy of “universal” consensus. (Hence all those routine positioning moves to maintain themselves at the center between the alleged extremes, so as to hive off or exclude dissenters. Though the liberals own emphasis on consensus over conflict often makes them insufficiently attentive to their opposition and undermines their own cause). But most of all, in its preoccupation with normatively reconciling “freedom” and “equality” and thereby rationalizing political power, is rather oblivious to the hard, difficult issues of power. What is power and how is it at all to be conceived, to be grasped in thought and articulated in speech, along side all the other matters it’s concomitant with? How is it generated, gathered, concentrated, exercised, and redistributed or regenerated? What are its modes and how are those modes convertible into one another? I think those are crucial issues for contemporary thought, not easy to resolve, which liberal thinking rather presumes upon. (Arendt made some contribution there, though with considerable weaknesses/avoidances to go together with its strength. I find Foucault’s “micro-physics of power” to be too all-pervasive and too de-differentiated, but also too parodic to be of much direct application, though he has his effects. I also don’t share his libertarianism).

As to the liberal tendency to conflate morality with politics, lots of thinkers have noted it from that nasty reactionary Carl Schmitt to the far more worldly-wise Arendt. Politics concerns public matters of collective impact and import, whereas morality involves private concerns about personal choice and conscientious belief. To conflate the two does harm to them both. If political conflicts are thoroughly moralized, they become all the more “absolute” and irresolvable. (For example, the abortion debate in the U.S., which is essentially irresolvable by public means, but also manipulated as a distraction from other public issues). If morality is tyrannized over by politics, then the capacity for choice is disrupted and beliefs become falsified, lose all “force” of credibility. (Though the private domain, as realm for the formation of intimate relations and spontaneous initiatives, needs to be publicly protected, since it ultimately is what provides the political public domain with its participant citizens/subjects).

So you asked for at least one “name” liberal political theorist who might be given to the aforesaid conflation. I’ll nominate Judith Sklar, whose “liberalism of fear”, for all that it might be motivated by a concern for cruelty and injustice, nonetheless exemplifies the sort of moralizing (anti-)politics involved, which should be avoided, as undermining the confidence in the “amorality” and risk involved in public-political processes, (which, as a passing-over-into-otherness, is also a realm of necessary alienation). I’ll also remark that much abstract concern for “human rights” has a curiously de-politicizing effect. Since it ignores that “rights”, however specified, are always legal-political institutions emerging from the power balances within a political society, and hence are always invested by power, else they are lacking in any coercive power for their enforcement. Notions of “humanitarian war” should be an obvious oxymoron to anyone with two wits of sense to rub together. Ignoring the material and social context and conditions for the application of the concept “rights”, while being thoroughly confused about means and ends, (since presumably “rights” are unconditional), doesn’t advance any cause, nor serve to ameliorate human lives. (Such thinking is also often utterly obtuse about some of the actual “interests” at work in such projections). No one can completely control the outcome of public-political conflicts and processes, nor guarantee the collective ends that emerge de facto or de jure from them, (if only a reproduction of the status quo, as no doubt many devoutly wish). But there’s always at least the off chance, the bare possibility, that some more genuinely normative innovation or some more fruitful arrangement could emerge, than would be pre-specified by a “normative” theory. Such a naked hope is the worldly vocation of politics.

Everyone should have a hobby.

Anyhow. I find it sad how often arguments against consequentialism seem to have no basis in what real consequentialists think about their own doctrine. For those interested, you can’t go too wrong reading Pettit or Norcross, and both have a lot of their papers available online. And really, Sidgwick got things more or less right a century ago.