Month: March 2006

Addendum. It occurred to me earlier that much or all of this disagreement or confusion over terms may be simply geographical, or geographico-political. All three of the people who think I’m confused are in the UK. I wonder if this has to do with the difference between having a written consitution and bill of rights, and not having either. In other words, the UK doesn’t actually have an explicit written constitutionally protected right to free speech or a free press. As a consequence of that it also doesn’t have a Supreme Court. As a consequence of that, the gummint can pass laws that would be unlikely to pass over here (although items like the Patriot Act may raise doubts about that). The House of Lords may amend such laws in a more free speech direction, but not in deference to a written explicit constitutional right. It may be that the legal right is more taken for granted here, with the result that there is less need to be expansive about it. Or, maybe not – since as I’ve mentioned, lots of people over here think the First Amendment is very expansive. Still, it’s a thought.

Norm and Eve have further thoughts. Norm starts:

Like Holocaust denial in general, falsifying evidence to the purpose of Holocaust denial is not a criminal offence. You are free, consequently, to do it.

Legally free; but not necessarily free tout court.

In a subsequent post, Ophelia says that in her view falsification of historical evidence should not be a criminal offence. Legally, then, one can do it, though this doesn’t make it morally right or admirable; it is (wherever it is), like Holocaust denial in general, a liberty right. That Ophelia endorses this legal state of affairs entails that she thinks falsifying historical evidence not only is a liberty right but it ought to remain one. From this it follows that she thinks it is part of a morally acceptable legal state of affairs that a person who falsifies historical evidence to propagate the lie that the Holocaust didn’t happen is behaving within their rights, albeit also behaving vilely.

Within their legal rights, but not necessarily within their rights in all senses. Again, I just remain unconvinced that the word ‘rights’ is universally understood to mean legal rights and nothing else. I remain unconvinced that it’s a peculiar or outlandish or unusual idea that one can have a legal right to do something without having a moral right. Not all moral issues are or should be or can be settled by the police. Not all moral issues are criminal or legal matters. That may be a very colloquial usage – and I’m not one to claim that every colloquial usage is necessarly sensible or informative; but if this one is a colloquial usage, I think it does point to a distinction that makes sense. It makes sense if only because we want to be able to think that people don’t have a (moral) right to do immoral things, without feeling obliged to call the police every few days. The colloguial (if it is colloquial) usage ‘You have no right to treat me this way’ does not translate ‘I am going to have you arrested for treating me this way’. It translates to a sort of intensifier of ‘ought’. There are mild oughts – you ought to be better-tempered – and there are stronger oughts – you ought not to call me a bitch every time you’re in a bad mood – and there are stronger oughts again – you ought not to call your child ugly and stupid every time you’re in a bad mood. It’s not against the law to call your child ugly and stupid, but my guess is that a lot of people would agree that it’s so cruel and destructive that no one has a moral right to do it, in spite of having a legal right. (And if there is enough of it, social workers may intervene, and children may be taken away, without anyone’s going to prison. [A friend of mine is a family court judge; she has to read piles of briefs that reach from the floor to her knees in one evening sometimes; there is a world of fuzzy territory here.] It’s not a criminal offence, but it can sometimes be forcibly prevented.) So – I think it’s a morally acceptable legal state of affairs that a person who falsifies historical evidence to propagate the lie that the Holocaust didn’t happen is behaving within their legal rights – but not moral rights.

Whatever may be your rights, you will not be a reputable figure within the community of historians, to say nothing of other scholars and people more generally.

This is all I’m saying. I’m saying that cashes out to historians not thinking historians have a moral, or epistemic, or vocational, or scholarly right to falsify, despite having a legal right. I’m saying you won’t hear historians saying ‘Irving has a right to falsify the evidence’ just like that, with no qualifications. At least, I don’t think so! I should offer a challenge. Somebody find me a historian saying that! It will be like one of those thousand dollar challenges, only without the thousand dollars.

This is merely to confuse the issue of legal and moral rights, which protect people against coercive interference in what they choose to do, and the standards applied to the conduct of certain activities by those who have a concern for them and/or the rules governing some competitive endeavours.

Well – hasn’t that been my whole point all along? I thought it had. I thought the difference between legal rights and moral rights was exactly what I’ve been talking about the whole time. Standards and rules are the kind of thing I’ve been talking about from the beginning, in disagreeing with unadorned unqualified unhedged claims that Irving has a right to falsify the evidence.

And Eve:

The moral right to free speech isn’t a right to have your views disseminated or published or agreed with; it’s just a right to say what you choose, without others forcibly preventing you.

Right; that’s what I said. “Which people and in what sense of ‘prevent us’ I wonder. In the examples Eve gives, I’m not sure it’s true that people close to us ought not to try to prevent us by persuasion, for instance. But no doubt she means forcibly prevent, which is another matter.” When I said that, she hadn’t said ‘forcibly’ prevent; now she has; so that answers my question.

I think we all mostly agree on the basics, it’s just that I keep thinking qualifications are being left out. If we can stipulate legal rights and forcibly prevent, I think we’re saying much the same thing. Although I find Sunstein’s chapter interesting, and it connects in an interesting way with Rawls’s idea of political liberalism and also a book by Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson on Democracy and Disagreement, so I might go on talking about those sometime.

Now, this is nice. At least, I like it. It’s the Amazon page for that book, but the nice thing is that it’s paired with a book by Dawkins. Good company they’ve put us in. (Yes, of course I check, why do you ask? And the answer is no; hasn’t sold a copy in days, or is it weeks.)

March is a good month. Don’t you think? I love March. March and October, they’re the best. Although April has a strong claim, despite the cruelty thing. But March is special. I think it’s the daffodils. I have a really slightly insane passion for daffodils – especially the way they’re planted in the UK, in those great blankets covering whole sections of parks and gardens. We don’t do that here, unfortunately. No blankets. But there are a lot of them, just in smaller batches, so I trudge around the place gazing fondly at clumps of them next to trees and on parking strips. I took a trip to London in March about ten years ago and people laughed at me when I showed them my pictures. ‘They’re all of daffodils!’ everyone exclaimed, falling over laughing. ‘Every single one is of daffodils!’ I looked and was much abashed to see that it was true. Kew with daffodils, Hampton Court with daffodils, York with daffodils, Cambridge with daffodils, Kenwood with daffodils, Burleigh with daffodils. Very King Charles’s head, it was. I felt slightly silly. But I was pleased to have so many pretty pictures of daffodils, all the same!

How sensible of Slavoj Žižek. Better than sensible, even.

…only religion, it is said, can elevate us to a higher spiritual level. Today, when religion is emerging as the wellspring of murderous violence around the world, assurances that Christian or Muslim or Hindu fundamentalists are only abusing and perverting the noble spiritual messages of their creeds ring increasingly hollow. What about restoring the dignity of atheism, one of Europe’s greatest legacies and perhaps our only chance for peace?

Of course this is the cue for thousands of parrots and robots and zombies to come clattering and squawking and staggering up to intone ‘Stalin Hitler Mao Pol Pot’ at us – but atheism wasn’t the essence of Communism or Nazism the way Christianity is to Christianity or Hinduism is to Hinduism, so try something else for a change.

Dostoyevsky warned against the dangers of godless moral nihilism, arguing in essence that if God doesn’t exist, then everything is permitted…This argument couldn’t have been more wrong: the lesson of today’s terrorism is that if God exists, then everything, including blowing up thousands of innocent bystanders, is permitted.

There’s another in the eye for the robots.

[T]hose who displayed the greatest “understanding” for the violent Muslim protests those cartoons caused were also the ones who regularly expressed their concern for the fate of Christianity in Europe. These weird alliances confront Europe’s Muslims with a difficult choice: the only political force that does not reduce them to second-class citizens and allows them the space to express their religious identity are the “godless” atheist liberals…

And the best bit –

Respect for other’s beliefs as the highest value can mean only one of two things: either we treat the other in a patronizing way and avoid hurting him in order not to ruin his illusions, or we adopt the relativist stance of multiple “regimes of truth,” disqualifying as violent imposition any clear insistence on truth. What, however, about submitting Islam – together with all other religions – to a respectful, but for that reason no less ruthless, critical analysis? This, and only this, is the way to show a true respect for Muslims: to treat them as serious adults responsible for their beliefs.

That’s downright quotable. And it’s exactly why I’ve been sneering so heavily at all the nonsense talked about ‘respect for others’ beliefs’ throughout this cartoon thing (and a lot longer than that, but it all got ratcheted up with the cartoon thing). Nobody with any sense should want either to be patronized or to be truth-relativized. Think about it, believers.

Just a little more of this (as Don called it) labyrinthine topic, then I’ll talk about different, straight up and down topics. I just want to say just this one more thing, as an old friend used to say on the phone when we were fifteen. (She’s a public radio producer now, so she has to do that fund-raising stuff; she’s in the middle of it right now, it’s ‘Pledge Week’. Terrible.) Just this one more thing on the moral right and people ought not to prevent us.

Lies and falsifications are generally (and certainly in the case of Holocaust-denial) morally wrong. And it does seem puzzling, even paradoxical, to say that we can have a moral right to do that which is morally wrong. Nonetheless it’s true that we do: we sometimes have the moral right to act – that is, people ought not to prevent us from acting – in ways which are undoubtedly morally wrong…I have the moral right to do what I please (within the law) with my own money; nonetheless it’s morally wrong of me to give none of it to charity.

But surely that definition of a moral right to act – that people ought not to prevent us from acting – can’t apply to falsification of history or other scholarship, because in fact people ought to and do prevent us from acting in that way. They do it via peer review. That is, surely, exactly the point of peer review: to prevent both mistakes and falsifications. Not every scholarly book gets peer reviewed, but a lot do, and if falsifications are detected, they are prevented – and they ought to be prevented. So if that is what a moral right is, then falsification of scholarship appears not to be a moral right. (And even without that, I take it to be a different kind of moral right from the moral right not to give money to charity. That seems to me to be almost definitional – almost inherent in the meaning of the words. ‘Falsification’ carries with it a meaning of wrongness; ‘charity’ carries with it the meaning that it is voluntary rather than coerced; so surely the wrongness of falsification is considerably less debatable than the wrongness of not giving money to charity.)

Even if the institution of peer review didn’t exist – suppose X knew that Y’s manuscript was full of falsifications, and told Y’s prospective publisher so, with documentation, and Y’s publisher dropped the book. Would it be wrong of X to prevent Y from publishing the book in that way? I say no; on the contrary. (Of course it might be unkind, in a sense disloyal, and so on, if the two are friends – but loyalty often conflicts with responsibility or public duty; that’s not news.) It shouldn’t be a police matter, but it should be a publisher matter. The police shouldn’t (and generally don’t) do the preventing, but someone should. In the same way – if any colleagues had known Jayson Blair was faking his reporting, they would have prevented him, by telling his editors. Did he have a moral right to fake his reporting, would it have been true at the time that the colleagues ought not to prevent him? Again, I say no. Newspapers don’t (to the best of my knowledge) have a moral right to tell lies, and neither (to the best of my knowledge) do reporters. So I don’t see how falisification can be that kind of moral right. In fact the more I think about it the less I can see it.