“Silly” Arguments Against Hate Crime Laws?

Responding to what I take to include my criticisms of laws defining “hate crimes” against the homeless, Ordinary Gentleman Will writes:

Obviously, intent matters. If someone is attacking people of a particular religious, ethnic or sexual orientation in an effort to harass, provoke or intimidate members of said group, it may be a good idea to assess additional punishment, particularly if a history of animosity and violence is involved. There may be practical reasons not to take this approach – federalizing enforcement is frequently ineffective; racial and religious animosity has subsided in recent decades – but it seems to me that special conditions can justify special enforcement strategies.

Remember that motivation isn’t the issue here – intent is. Attacking a black person to coerce or intimidate other black people is materially worse than randomly assaulting some unfortunate passerby. The later is aimed at only one person; the former targets a (potentially vulnerable) community.

I’m not sure that I can explain myself without getting rather deep into the philosophical weeds, but this seems importantly mistaken. In short, the reason that doing violence or otherwise committing crimes “in an effort to harass, provoke or intimidate” is certainly more serious, and possibly deserving of more serious punishment, than doing the same violence or committing the same crimes without such ends in mind, is that the former behaviors constitute different actions than the latter, in much the same way that waterboarding a CIA agent as a part of SERE training isn’t an act of torture while doing the very same thing to an unwilling al Qaeda member clearly can be. True, attacking someone as a means to coerce or intimidate or – perhaps – harass or provoke is reasonably regarded as a more serious crime than “mere” random assault, and it doesn’t seem inappropriate to include within the law a category that defines it as such; we do just this sort of thing, after all, in differentiating murder from manslaughter. But obviously it shouldn’t matter at all whether such a behavior was gone in for as a consequence of hatred for some vulnerable group rather than, say, some other sociopathic tendency or perhaps the desire to draw attention to some political cause.

Hate crime laws have got, in other words, everything to do with “motivation” rather than “intent”: just as it’s possible to intimidate or attempt to sow severe unrest on the grounds of something other than hate, so someone who attacks a homeless person because he hates or resents his homelessness clearly need not have in mind any of the wider goals that Will alludes to. And it’s those goals, rather than the particular sorts of subjective affections that motivate them, that are relevant to the determination of the seriousness of a crime.

Filed under: government/law, morality, philosophy

Thought Experiments, ctd.

Damon Linker has up a response (check the second update) to my latest post at the Scene, in which he grants the importance of “hard-nosed analysis of whether the Bush administration was justified in torturing terrorist suspects in the specific, concrete circumstances it faced after 9/11”, but then objects:

… I think thought experiments like the one I lay out above also have their place, not because we should be open to torture (and other nastiness) in the abstract, but rather because such experiments might help us to understand and empathize with the moral complexity of statesmanship in times of genuine crisis (as opposed to during bouts of media-driven hysteria). And this understanding and empathy just might lead some to temper a bit of their indignation-fueled self-righteousness when they set out to judge the decisions of those who acted (and yes, perhaps erred in acting) to defend the common good.

I think we can read what Linker is saying here in two ways, neither of which seems to me to constitute an especially forceful objection. On the one hand, he might be saying that the mere fact that there are some situations in which a given behavior is permissible or obligatory shows that in any situation, whether such a behavior is permissible or obligatory is a complex question. But of course that’s false: having sex, for example, is sometimes okay, sometimes not, and sometimes in a morally gray area. But that there are situations in which it’s actually or questionably okay doesn’t show anything at all about the range of situations in which it demonstrably isn’t.

The other way to read Linker is as saying that awareness of the possibility of an agent’s misdiagnosing an actual situation – i.e., of mistaking, say, a situation in which torture is unjustified for one in which it is or might be – should be enough to bring us to sympathize with people who did something that we regard as unjust. But this is only plausible if the misdiagnosis in question was itself an understandable one, and so once again it seems that it’s the particulars of the actual case that really need to do the work: we need to look at the specifics and see, for example, whether the relevant actors in the CIA or the Bush administration could really have reasonably believed, say, that they faced anything like a ticking time-bomb scenario. It’s true enough that the question of why someone acted unjustly is relevant to determining the exact way in which he’s culpable – but there can be culpable ignorance, too, and even “honest” stupidity isn’t usually regarded as an exculpation.

Filed under: morality, philosophy, torture

“Against Thought-Experiments”

At the Scene, I explain why thinking clearly about torture means thinking clearly about real circumstances, rather than imaginary ones.

Filed under: morality, personal, philosophy, torture

Why Torture Is Wrong

I pretty much shared Daniel’s opinion of Jim Manzi’s demand for a non-pacifist case against torture, but I’ve got a brief post up at the Scene trying to meet the challenge with some good ol’ Phil 101ing.

Filed under: morality, personal, philosophy, torture

In Other News, Hillary Clinton Will Soon Begin Running the State Department According to Female Intuition

Does Conor Friedersdorf’s great post on torture really lead with a quote in which Damon Linker happily equates Aristotelian phronesis with the Bushian “gut”? Why yes, it does:

In the end, the statesman needs to rely on his judgment — on what Aristotle called practical wisdom (phronesis) and President Bush (and Stephen Colbert) called his “gut” — in making the decision about whether and when and for how long and in what ways to deviate from what is normally right in order to “preserve the mere existence or independence of society” against its mortal enemies.

Sorry to get all picky, but look: Phronesis is a quality of the soul, a particular sort of skillful wisdom that enables the immediate recognition of the right and the wrong as such. And as for your gut … well, it don’t judge. It just digests stuff, and then helps you to poop it out.

If ever there were a sign of the extent to which our self-understanding has deteriorated into a contradictory near-nothingness, my gut tells me that this would be it.

Filed under: philosophy

In Defense of Alice Waters

Friends and readers have been inquiring whether, given my previous praise for what I’ve called Alice Waters’s “culinary conservatism” (on which see more from Alan here and here), I’d have anything to say about Julie Gunlock’s criticisms of her project in the virtual pages of National Review Online. To be perfectly honest I’d much prefer just to let this one slide, but I’m pretty sure that bloggy ethics rule that out … so here goes.

Let’s begin with a story. I am, as it happens, presently working through some issues in ethical theory with a group of Berkeley undergraduates, and as is not at all uncommon in these sorts of circumstances I seem to be the only person in the room who thinks that value claims are more than an expression of Humean sentiments. “Murder is wrong”, say I. “But not always!” comes the reply. “Perhaps”, I grant, “but sometimes it is wrong, which just goes to show that rightness and wrongness are parts of the objective world.” “But how do you know?” comes the utterly predictable response. “For what would you say to someone who disagreed with you?”

At this point my tendency is to get rather agitated and ask them what they would say to someone who disagreed with them on whether the available fossil evidence proves that there once were dinosaurs, and this tends at the very least to throw them for a loop. But in the present context that’s neither here nor there: the immediate relevance of exchanges like this one lies in the disturbing extent to which subjectivism has corroded the foundations of our public discourse; hence “I think” or “To me” precedes nearly every sentence, senses of have taken the place of the real things, nonsensical talk of subjectivity waits lurking around every dialectical corner, and so on. But now compare my Berkeley undergraduates to Ms. Gunlock:

The truth is, organic food is an expensive luxury item, something bought by those who have the resources. Those who can afford it and want it should have it (my emphasis – JS), but organic food is not a panacea for the world’s ills.

Suppose we grant Gunlock the point about expense and luxury – though I’ll return to that in a moment. But why not just: Those who can afford it should have it? How exactly does “want” matter? (Are there cases in which people shouldn’t have what they want?) Is it really that impossible to wrap one’s mind around the idea that, just as there might be genuine relationships of superiority and inferiority among ways of life or novels or works of art or music, so the same might hold for what we eat? Can it be true that the very same movement that gives us the classicism of the New Criterion and George Will’s case against blue jeans is unable to recognize that our meals might also be part of what constitutes our lives as noble or, as the case may be, not? The “purpose of food”, writes Gunlock, “is nourishment” – but of course while that may be true enough for dogs and cats and horses, it’s no more true in our case than it is that the purpose of sex is procreation, the purpose of architecture providing shelter, or the purpose of music passing the time. Would the world really end if we allowed considerations other than wants and the almighty dollar to impact our choices about what we bring to our table?

And as to that almighty dollar: Gunlock quotes Waters as acknowledging the increased cost of local and organic food, though adding that “people [will] simply have to make the choice between expensive grapes and Nike tennis shoes”. Not good enough!, objects Gunlock:

What [Waters] fails to appreciate is that some people can’t buy those tennis shoes either.

Really? You think so? I mean, is this supposed to be news? No doubt Waters, squishy liberal that she is, is at least a bit sensitive to the fact that not everyone can afford to eat well; that doesn’t rule out, however, the possibility that those who can eat well, should, and that if you’re lucky enough to face the choice between grass-fed beef and cable TV it’s probably the latter that ought to go. As in any other case, figuring out what’s right demands attention to particular circumstances rather than universal rules; but given Gunlock’s rhetoric, it hardly seems “condescending” to say that matters pertaining to what the Slow Foodies like to call gastronomy often gets pretty short shrift in such deliberations.

Does eating well mean always eating organic? No, it doesn’t – and I’m quite confident that Waters wouldn’t dispute this. Nor does it mean always buying locally, always buying seasonally, always knowing your producers, and so on. But perhaps more than anything else, what eating well demands is cooking well, and then eating what you’ve cooked around a table and as a family: hence if there’s anyone who should be criticizing Waters’s case for buying fresh ingredients (lots of trips to the store!) and doing such things as cooking your own beans (takes hours!), it should be those parents who, unlike Gunlock, don’t or can’t manage to stay at home. But once again, making the case for the noble or virtuous nature of a certain way of life doesn’t mean making that life binding on everyone; Waters knows fully well that not all families manage to have a stay-at-home parent, and that those families with two working parents will have to cut corners when it comes to meals. This doesn’t, however, preclude her thinking that whenever it is possible, cooking should be given its due.

Look, though: I’ve joined in on criticizing Waters before, and the Slow Food people pretty much cut off contact with me after a pretty caustic column that I wrote for Culture11 about the genuinely out of touch and – dare I say it? – elitist elements of San Francisco’s “Slow Food Nation” extravaganza. It’s one thing, though, to raise criticisms of the way a message is being delivered, and quite another to use those criticisms as a tool for clumsily bludgeoning that message’s content. Grunlock of all people should be sensitive to the need to choose one’s words carefully … and NR, for that matter, shouldn’t lose sight of the possibility that attention to taste and respect for the wisdom of the past might have something to teach us about how we ought to eat.

(Cross-posted at The American Scene.)

Filed under: conservatism, food, philosophy

Freedom’s Underside, Pt. III

by JL Wall

E.D. Kain, on Iraq:

But that should call in to question why we are so dependent on oil to begin with, and beyond that, why we as a culture have shifted so many of our priorities to a belief in unending growth that can and should be enforced by an omnipotent military.

The problem with “the American Way Of Life is not on the table” “is not up for compromise” or some other such better phrasing that’s escaping me this morning doesn’t lie in a devotion to liberty.  But we haven’t defined The American Way Of Life as involving, to a primary degree, devotion to liberty, but to growth, the clearing of the economic elbow room in which we will then practice our liberty.  But when “growth” and “expansion” are viewed as at least as essential as liberty, when reconsidering “unending growth” is a reconsideration of The American Way Of Life even if such growth is not sustainable (except, perhaps, by force — eh, what I mean is anangkê, not bîos or hybris), then we ourselves are compelled to do the compelling.

Which is to say: anangkê esmen — we are compelled — we are required — we are constrained to this course by our choice of this course.  We clear space, ostensibly in which to grow and expand a liberty, but in reality because the past and present benefits have grown comfortable: we haven’t seen the cost, the underside; or if we have, we are less terrified by them than the the unknown nature of a different life.

And we see liberties more essential to liberty constrained, restricted, deemed inessential because they interfere with the growth which is supposed to to allow them to flourish.  Though meant as a force to expand liberty, unrestrained and unending growth (or at least the philosophy thereof) are forces of constraint on our ability to live in liberty.  Yesterday there was a girl on campus shouting very loudly that she had free copies of the Constitution for anyone who wanted them — presumably (I could be wrong) as part of those tea-party-things I’ve heard about.  I was tempted to tell her it was better late than never she’d discovered the document.

Filed under: civil liberties, economics, government/law, philosophy, war

Why “Marriage” Matters

A couple of weeks ago, after I posted my unpublished same-sex marriage essay, Eve Tushnet and I had a nice e-mail back-and-forth in which she remarked, among other things, that given that essay’s overall argument it was pretty silly of me to claim at the end that the debate over marriage was nothing but a fight over a “mere word”. Two weeks later, thanks to Eve’s latest – start here, work down ‘til you get to the Christopher Logue excerpt, and don’t continue reading this post ‘til then – I’m up at midnight trying to hammer out a quick post on why that complaint was a hundred percent right.

I mean, the marriage debate is a debate over a word: but like a great many of our words, “marriage” isn’t a mere word, but rather a word that has a rather central place in our cultural self-understanding and so can’t change its significance without having pretty dramatic effects on many other aspects of that self-understanding, too. Hence Eve:

Gay marriage is a big deal for the same reasons given by its supporters!–it is a real change in the culture, a deeply significant change, and a change with far-reaching public implications. I don’t think you can write paeans to marriage as a public and cultural status, then turn around and say that gay marriage will have very limited public effects. Marriage isn’t designed to have limited public effects.

I think this is spot-on. How we understand marriage is a big deal, and the push for same-sex marriage is a push to have quite a lot of us – by which I mean: perhaps not those of us who attend fancy schools and live in DC or Berkeley, but still quite a lot of us – change our understanding of marriage in pretty dramatic ways. And the idea, which is trotted out with disturbing frequency given how transparently absurd it is, that the push for same-sex marriage is anything short of this, i.e. that it’s just a push for a change in the legal code that won’t have to have any wider cultural consequences unless people allow it to, is … well … transparently absurd. Note well the title of Eve’s post: the language we speak is an essentially public language, and politics and publicity just don’t come apart like that, which means that a change in how marriage is treated in our politics simply has to be a change in how it is treated by our culture; the only real question should be whether you think such a change would be a good one.

To repeat: the real question is whether you think such a change would be a good one. And I think it’s quite possible to argue that it would be: there are, after all, many cases in which things change for the better, and indeed if your view of history is sufficiently optimistic you might think that that is usually how it is, and so that there’s reason to assume that the normalization of same-sex marriage will follow a similar course, with homophobia and traditional gender roles going the merry way of racism the aristocracy. But then the point is that this is an empirical claim, and even if you’re not (as I’m not) the sort of person who gets all fearful about religious freedom or slippery slopes or All the Awful Things That Might Happen you still have to acknowledge the likelihood that some good things would be all-but-irretrievably lost as a consequence of such a change, that there would be some less than fully salutary effects of modifying our cultural self-understanding in the way that the push for same-sex marriage proposes that we should. Some changes are like the Wild Card and the invention of the forward pass, while others are more like interleague play and the BCS; and even if allowing same-sex marriage turned out to be a change like the first two there would still be at least some ways in which the self-understandings of future generations would likely be impoverished relative to our own.

Yes, Quine showed us that the meanings of words can and do change. And yes, such changes are often very much for the better – just think of how our concept of space, incomprehensible as it would have been to Aristotle or Newton, allows us to understand the universe in incredibly illuminating ways. (Though think also of how, having gotten beyond the scientific naïveté of the ancients, we often find ourselves at a loss when it comes time to account for the presence in a world like ours of things like mindedness or mind-independent value.) And, finally, yes, our public understanding of marriage has already changed in a host of dramatic (though as dramatic as this one?) ways in both recent and not-so-recent years. But all of that only sketches the background; it does not show where we should go from here. “Marriage” does not pick out a natural kind, but rather a kind that is created, and given that it is up to us to shape that word’s significance in ways that meet our deepest human needs. The challenge is to do this as best we can, and given that challenge’s obvious immensity the confidence of gay marriage proponents that they have an easy solution that can’t be called into question by anyone but bigots and homophobes strikes me as evidence of a deeply dangerous sort of hubris.

Addendum: In the morning light, this post looks to be worded a bit differently than I’d have put things if I wrote it right now. But such is the Internet; I’ve made some very minor stylistic alterations, but I stand by the content.

Filed under: marriage, philosophy

Freedom’s Underside, ctd.

From John McDowell, “Conceptual Capacities in Perception” (in his Having the World in View):

One does not sacrifice one’s freedom if one acquiesces in the authority of what one recognizes as compelling reasons. Recognizing reasons as compelling is itself an exercise of one’s capacities for rational self-determination. If one offers no resistance when one’s beliefs take the form reason requires them to take, one is not handing one’s life over to an alien force. One is not abdicating from the responsibility to be in rational control of one’s thinking.

Filed under: philosophy

Wood on Opacity and Interiority in the Bible

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Georgetown’s Tod Linafelt takes James Wood to task for judging the characters of the Hebrew Bible to be “opaque” and lacking in the sort of richness of interior life that marks the greatness of modern literary fiction. As Wood puts it, the biblical David for example is a strictly “public character”:

In the modern sense, he has no privacy. He hardly ever speaks his inner thoughts to himself; he speaks to God, and his soliloquies are prayers. He is external to us because in some way he does not exist for us, but for the Lord. He is seen by the Lord, is transparent to the Lord, but remains opaque to us. (How Fiction Works, p. 141)

What is strange about this criticism is that in general this is precisely how other persons simply are (“publicly”) given to us: not with spoken soliloquies or any other mode of access to what is being conveyed in their “inner thoughts” and prayers, but rather as often puzzling complexes of words and deeds much of whose mental (and, indeed, decidedly non-mental) lives are left underdetermined by that which is open to view. Publicity simply entails privacy in these ways, and so narrating a character’s thoughts and motivations so as to clear away any of the usual third-personal opacity as to what he is up to and why is not so much a way of making that character “public” as of putting what is usually an essentially private mode of access in place of the truly public one, of violating the structural constraints within which a person ever can exist “for us” and instead revealing how it is that he exists “for himself”. Hence the “publicized privacy” that Wood finds in Macbeth can really be no such thing at all, and the “invisible but all-seeing” audience in Crime and Punishment only knows what it knows because it can do quite a lot more than “see”.

Linafelt sees this, I think, and he also makes the even more crucial point that the mere fact that a character’s private life is not laid out in the open in these sorts of ways is no evidence at all that such a life is supposed to be altogether absent:

Far from presenting characters who exist solely in the public realm and who are solely concerned with God, the Bible exploits to good effect a genuinely private self in its characters, one that is largely unavailable to readers and to other characters. Biblical narrative consistently, though not slavishly, avoids giving access to the inner lives of its characters, to what they might be thinking or feeling in any given situation, even though that inner life is often vitally important to character motivation and to plot development and cannot always be filled in with reference to God.

And again, this time citing Erich Auerbach’s description of biblical narratives as “fraught with background”:

… in The Iliad and The Odyssey both objects and people tend to be fully described and illuminated, with essential attributes and aspects — from physical descriptions to the thoughts and motivations of characters — in the foreground for the reader to apprehend. But with biblical narrative such details are, for the most part, kept in the background and are not directly available to the reader. On the question of the relationship between dialogue and characters’ interiority, for example, Auerbach writes that the speech of biblical personages “does not serve, as does speech in Homer, to manifest, to externalize thoughts — on the contrary, it serves to indicate thoughts that remain unexpressed.” Wood, like many readers, has mistaken lack of access to characters’ inner lives for a denial of the existence of those inner lives.

Having read relevant pieces of Wood’s essay, it’s hard not to feel that this last charge is pretty well motivated. It is true enough that, for example, the biblical David is caught up in a narrative arc that seems dictated by something greater than himself, but surely if we take David to have seen Bathsheba, found her beautiful, inquired about her, called for her, laid with her, and then sent her away, it does not make much sense at all to suppose, as Wood does, that David “does not think”: for he simply must be thinking something if he is to do all of this, and the status of those thoughts is untouched by the fact that we who are reading about him may have some trouble figuring out what they are. Wood proposes that the true genius of the modern novel lies in the way that its capacity to display interiority then invites us to “read between the lines”; but why, one wonders, can we not try to do the same in the case of King David’s actions? Hence Linafelt:

What, then, motivates David’s taking of Bathsheba? Wood assumes that David is “instantly struck with lust” upon seeing her. Perhaps, but in fact the narrator never reveals whether David lusts after Bathsheba or not. And it is possible to imagine his taking of Bathsheba as a calculated political act against a rival faction within the court. Besides, lust and political ambition are far from being mutually exclusive. The point, in any case, is that though we are not told David’s motivations, he clearly has some.

All this is not, of course, to say that the kinds of post-biblical literary advances that Wood cites were anything but that; though it is worth pointing out that Linafelt also argues toward the end of his essay that a quite sophisticated capacity for the use of the free indirect style actually does make itself manifest in the Hebrew scriptures, albeit only on occasion and even then rather briefly. It is, however, entirely possible to highlight the shortcomings of the biblical literary style in comparison to that of the modern novel without making it out as if the Bible’s characters are hollow-headed dolls in the hands of a divine puppeteer. I like Wood’s work quite a lot, and in this particular essay the discussion of Macbeth alone is enough to make it clear why Wood’s reputation as a critic is entirely deserved. But as Linafelt says, the stories of the Bible surely demand a lot more of the close reading and careful literary attention that, even more than his shimmering prose, are usually the things that underlie Wood’s real brilliance.

(Cross-posted)

Filed under: media/culture, philosophy, religion