There’s a lot of buzz in the blogosphere about a DARPA project which aims to predict terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups, through creating a futures market, in which traders can speculate on the possibility of attacks; the “NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/29/politics/29TERR.html?hp picks up on it too. Most of the commentary is negative, but “Josh Chafetz”:http://oxblog.blogspot.com/2003_07_27_oxblog_archive.html#105943317047655345 likes the idea, and invokes Hayek.
From the monthly archives:
July 2003
Via “William Sjostrom”:http://www.atlanticblog.com/archives/001011.html#001011, I discover that “George Will”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48554-2003Jul25.html has opined on the draft EU constitution. I suppose I should be grateful that a stateside pundit is actually writing about it; not many people outside the Eurocracy are interested. Indeed, according to the “Commission’s own figures”:http://europa.eu.int/rapid/start/cgi/guesten.ksh?p_action.gettxt=gt&doc=IP/03/1115|0|RAPID&lg=EN&display=, only 45% of Europeans have even heard of the Convention that prepared the draft constitution (up from 30% in March). Furthermore, Will starts off by making a reasonable point – that Europe can learn some useful lessons from America’s constitutional history – but he frames it in a rather condescending fashion.
bq. Europe is, relative to the United States, remarkably young, meaning naive and inexperienced regarding the writing of a constitution. The handiwork of the 105 members of the convention which, led by former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, drafted the document for 16 months reflects a failure to grasp what a proper constitution does and does not do.
Unfortunately, Will’s article goes downhill from there, as it becomes increasingly clear that neither he nor his research assistants know very much about the European Union, or indeed about any constitutional tradition other than the American.
Via Scott Martens, I saw that the Chronicle of Higher Education has published an article on the differences between philosophy in Britain and North America.
Chris “writes”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000292.html a couple of days ago about his sense of discomfort at
bq. an attitude that sees the non-human world as merely an instrument for or an obstacle to the realization of human designs and intentions.
I’ve been interested for a while in a small group of people who take that attitude one step further. “Transhumanists” and “extropians” are extreme techno-libertarians who argue that _human_ nature is an obstacle to the realization of human designs and intentions.
Larry Solum has a typically insightful post responding to Matt Evans’s criticism of Richard Dawkins for proposing a naturalistic ethics. I think Larry’s criticisms are spot on, but for my money much too tentative.
Over the past few weeks, many analytic philosophers — including my wife and several of her colleagues — have received a free copy of a book called The Elements of Mentality: The foundations of psychology and philosophy by David Hume. Not, you understand, the David Hume who wrote A Treatise of Human Nature, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and other well-known books. He has been dead for some time. This David Hume, as is discreetly noted on the inside back flap is a pseudonym. Why pick “David Hume” out of all possible noms de plume? I suppose it can’t hurt to have your book shelved along with ones written by the most influential English-speaking philosopher in the past three hundred years.
Dan Drezner’s “post”:http://volokh.com/2003_07_20_volokh_archive.html#105917081573152949 on the agreements and differences between Josh Marshall and Steven den Beste has stirred up quite a debate, including posts by “Kieran”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000297.html , “Kevin Drum”:http://www.calpundit.com/archives/001760.html and “Tim Dunlop”:http://www.roadtosurfdom.com/surfdomarchives/001388.php . My tuppence worth: Dan has identified some interesting points of agreement between Den Beste and Marshall, but I still don’t buy Dan’s arguments about the justifications for the war, or its likely consequences.
Over at Crescat Sententia, Will Baude has been defending subjectivism about morality. Will doesn’t defend the traditional positivist view that "Murder is wrong" means (roughly) "Boo for murder!", but rather that it means "I disapprove of murder". Freespace’s Timothy Sandefur responds to Will with several moral and legal arguments. This seems to me to be a mistake. Will’s making a metaphysical and semantic claim, and the right responses will be based on metaphysics or semantics. Fortunately, there are plenty of the latter kind of argument.
Dan Drezner weighs in about the reasons for the war in Iraq and, in particular, whether a President might be justified in lying to the country in order to invade. Steven Den Beste believes that the nation wasn’t told the real reason for invading, but that the ends justify the means. Josh Marshall thinks that this is unjustifiable.
I posted a pointed to to a moderately pro-GM report the other day. But in the comments section I got pretty revolted by the suggestion that one day we might synthesize all our food. As I said there, I want my potatoes from the earth and my apples from a tree. I don’t think there’s anything especially “green” about feeling this and I’m somewhat embarassed, as someone who is supposed to live by good arguments, by how hard I find it to get beyond the raw data of feeling, intuition and emotion when I try to think about what is of value.
The best I can do, is, I think to notice how much of that is of value in human life has to do with an engagement with the natural world and a recognition of the uniqueness and (sorry about this word) the ‘otherness’ of the world beyond the human. I’m not just thinking about raw untamed nature here (Lear on the heath) but also about the way in which an artist has to work with the natural properties of pigments, a gardener has to work with plants and their distinctive characteristics, and a cook has to work with ingredients. Architects too have to work with materials, with stone, wood and so on.
There was an article a couple days back in the “Chronicle of Higher Education”:http://chronicle.com/ called “What People Just Don’t Understand About Academic Fields.” (Unfortunately, I can’t link to it because apparently you have to be a subscriber–but it doesn’t really matter for this post.) The article included a few paragraphs from a handful of professors in different fields each talking about what most people don’t seem to understand about what they do or why they do it. None of the entries struck me as all that interesting, but they did remind me of an essay by Isaiah which has been bothering me for awhile. The essay is called “Philosophy and Government Repressession” (1954) and was printed in “The Sense of Reality”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0712673679/qid=1059082425/sr=12-8/104-8064233-2395929?v=glance&s=books. In trying to correct what he thinks is a common “misunderstanding of what philosophy is and what it can do,” argues that second- and third- rate philosophers are essentially worthless, except as obstacles to be overcome by truly great thinkers.
This piece of disingenuous nonsense from Volokh Conspirator Randy Barnett has already been kicked around by Henry and Brian, so I’m not going to write about it. But I’m pleased to see that Head Conspirator Eugene Volokh agrees with pretty much everything Henry has been saying.
Eugene attacks a Slate column which argues that conservatives in general — Ann Coulter, right-wing intellectuals, the White House, Uncle Tom Cobbley and all — are a monolithic unit differentiated only by their willingness to say what they really believe. Coulter is just a more loud-mouthed version of Ari Fleischer, and the Volokh Conspirators are separated from the wingnuts only by the occasional “empty semantic difference.” Eugene is properly outraged that someone would be so stupid or spiteful as to lump responsible conservatives like him in with Ann Coulter. He persuasively argues that when someone does this “it’s hard to give much credit to the rest of his moral — or logical — judgment.” Too true, Eugene. You should send Randy an email with a link to your blog or something — he’d really benefit from reading it.
Like Henry I was bemused by Randy Barnett’s MSNBC effort. I was thinking of teeing off on some of the details, but Fisking is so 2002. And Henry’s and Tim Lambert’s responses are better than anything I could have done. So instead I’ll just mention something that arose almost in passing in the article.
bq. The Supreme Court “decided the election” (rather than reversed a rogue Southern state Supreme Court and restore the rulings of local, mainly democratic, election officials).
I guess there is a typo here, and ‘democratic’ should be ‘Democratic’. Either way, there is something very odd about the fact that we can tell the political sympathies of electoral officials from their past public pronouncements.
“Randy Barnett”:http://volokh.com/2003_07_20_volokh_archive.html#105898768113978353 blogs to tell us about an “article”:http://www.msnbc.com/news/856672.asp#030723 he’s just written; it asks why the Left is living in its own “constructed reality,” where Bush didn’t lie, Al Gore is President, Bellesisles didn’t cook the books _und so weiter_. Fellow Volokh-blogger, Juan “chimes in”:http://volokh.com/2003_07_20_volokh_archive.html#105899198850087066 that he’s reminded of the Left’s contortions over fascism in the 1930’s. Readers (at least this one) wonder why they’re getting this sort of knockabout stuff from the Volokh Conspiracy, usually a reliable source for challenging and thought-provoking arguments.