Author: Ophelia Benson

By way of contrast, here is Richard Chappel at Philosophy Etcetera actually thinking about the subject instead of just issuing dictats. Makes a change. He takes empirical evidence into account, linking to the New Scientist, and he looks at some feeble arguments. It’s good stuff. He also takes on a rather unpleasant analogy of Keith Burgess-Jackson’s. I was especially interested in that because a couple of readers have recommended KB-J to me, thinking that he and B&W have a lot in common. But I don’t think so. I haven’t bothered reading him much, but that’s because what I did read struck me as pure boilerplate. Uninspired, familiar, and peevish. The post Richard discusses is (in my view) somewhat worse than that.

I have said in this blog many times that the very idea of homosexual marriage is incoherent, which is why I put the word “marriage” in quotation marks. I do the same for dog “voting.” If we took our dogs to the polls and got them to push levers with their paws, they would not be voting. They would be going through the motions of voting. It would be a charade. Voting is not made for dogs. They lack the capacity to participate in the institution. The same is true of homosexuals and marriage.

Oh very droll. But actually I don’t think it’s meant to be droll, or not entirely; I think it’s meant to be insulting, and with a creepy undertone of – you know, weird stuff, bestiality, dirt, stupidity, animalness. The kind of thing the Nazis (and other people) liked to say about Jews. And it’s also an echo of that patronizing-insulting joke of Johnson’s. You know the one.

Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.

Nasty stuff. If anybody ever recommends K B-J to me again I think I’ll have to have a temper tantrum.

Some more thought for the day. Because some days need more than one thought. And because Bentham is out of copyright, and because this is funny stuff. I haven’t been used to think of Bentham as a funny guy, but that just shows how much I know.

In looking over the catalogue of human actions (says a partizan of this principle) in order to determine which of them are to be marked with the seal of disapprobation, you need but to take counsel of your own feelings: whatever you find in yourself a propensity to condemn, is wrong for that very reason…In that same proportion also is it meet for punishment: if you hate much, punish much: if you hate little, punish little: punish as you hate. If you hate not at all, punish not at all: the fine feelings of the soul are not to be overborne and tyrannized by the harsh and rugged dictates of political utility.

Footnote: 1. One man says, he has a thing made on purpose to tell him what is right and what is wrong; and that it is called a moral sense: and then he goes to work at his ease, and says, such a thing is right, and such a thing is wrong—why? “because my moral sense tells me it is”.

2. Another man comes and alters the phrase: leaving out moral, and putting in common, in the room of it. He then tells you, that his common sense teaches him what is right and wrong, as surely as the other’s moral sense did: meaning by common sense, a sense of some kind or other, which he says, is possessed by all mankind: the sense of those, whose sense is not the same as the author’s, being struck out of the account as not worth taking…

4. Another man says, that there is an eternal and immutable Rule of Right: that that rule of right dictates so and so: and then he begins giving you his sentiments upon any thing that comes uppermost . and these sentiments (you are to take for granted) are so many branches of the eternal rule of right.

5. Another man, or perhaps the same man (it’s no matter) says, that there are certain practices conformable, and others repugnant, to the Fitness of Things; and then he tells you, at his leisure, what practices are conformable and what repugnant: just as he happens to like a practice or dislike it.

6. A great multitude of people are continually talking of the Law of Nature; and then they go on giving you their sentiments about what is right and what is wrong: and these sentiments, you are to understand, are so many chapters and sections of the Law of Nature.

I particularly like all that because it describes so well something I read a few minutes after I read it, in an interview-article on Peter Singer in a Christian magazine of a rather, shall we say, strict orientation. ‘Strict’ there is a euphemism for various tendentious words like mindless, unreflective, bible-thumping; that sort of thing.

Don’t expect Peter Singer to be quoted heavily on the issue that roiled the Nov. 2 election, same-sex marriage. That for him is intellectual child’s play, already logically decided, and it’s time to move on to polyamory. While politicians debate the definition of marriage between two people, Mr. Singer argues that any kind of “fully consensual” sexual behavior involving two people or 200 is ethically fine. For example, when I asked him last month about necrophilia (what if two people make an agreement that whoever lives longest can have sexual relations with the corpse of the person who dies first?), he said, “There’s no moral problem with that.”

If you read the article you’ll notice that the author doesn’t trouble to say why in fact consensual sex between however many people or with a corpse is not ethically fine. Doesn’t even trouble to note that there might be something to say. Just takes it for granted – thus filling out Bentham’s portrait nicely. Obviously he thinks it’s icky therefore it’s wrong and there’s no need to say anything more, just as there isn’t about same-sex marriage.

And then he wraps it up with a neat summation:

This is important not only for Princeton and similar institutions but for all of American society. In the absence of debate at our leading universities, each election is an attempt by people connected to biblical ethics to hold off an onslaught by those who have imbibed Singerism and try to win by ridicule what they cannot achieve by honest reporting of reality.

Biblical ethics. Right. Which biblical ethics? The stuff about dashing babies’ brains out against walls? Jesus’ repudiation of ‘family values’? No? Well why not? Well we know why not, it’s much the same as what Bentham is talking about. It’s all pretense, in short. He means ‘the biblical ethics that prop up the prejudices I already have, and not the others.’ Phooey, now I’m not amused any more, I’m irritated. That’s no fun.

Thought for the day. From John Stuart Mill’s ‘Whewell on Moral Philosophy’:

The person who has to think more of what an opinion leads to, than of what is the evidence of it, cannot be a philosopher, or a teacher of philosophers. Of what value is the opinion on any subject, of a man of whom everyone knows that by his profession he must hold that opinion?…Whoever thinks that persons thus tied are fitting depositaries of the trust of educating a people, must think that the proper object of intellectual education is not to strengthen and cultivate the intellect, but to make sure of its adopting certain conclusions: that, in short, in the exercise of the thinking faculty, there is something, either religion, or conservatism, or peace, or whatever it be, more important than truth.

Aw, that’s nice. A reader alerted me to this blog post which is a favourable review of the dictionary. And it’s by someone I don’t even know, too. Someone in Adelaide. He likes that article by Andrew Weeks on Gibson and God, as well. Good guy, this Adelaide fella. If I’m ever in Adelaide I’ll look him up, see if he’d like to show me around, buy me dinner, laugh at my jokes.

Peter Beinart in The New Republic points out that conservatives, long in the habit of sniggering at political correctness and group whining, have found a disrespected minority of their very own: evangelicals. Yeah they have, haven’t they.

Mind you, in the usual obligatory ritual, Beinart hands a little ground back, which he shouldn’t have.

To be fair, occasionally liberals do treat evangelical Christians with condescension and scorn. Conservatives frequently, and justifiably, expressed outrage at a Washington Post news story that called followers of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.”…On November 4, in The New York Times, Garry Wills suggested that America now resembles the theocracies of the Muslim world more than it resembles Western Europe, which is offensive, not to mention absurd.

Well is it false that followers of Falwell and Robertson are largely uneducated? I don’t know any statistics on the subject, but it seems on the face of it unlikely that F & R would appeal to educated people – unless one has a slightly special definition for ‘educated’. And as for the next part, ‘offensive’ is irrelevant – in fact its irrelevance is part of the point of the article, so it seems absent-minded of Beinart to use the word.

But then once he’s got that ‘to be fair’ stuff out of the way, things pick up.

What these (and most other) liberals are saying is that the Christian Right sees politics through the prism of theology, and there’s something dangerous in that. And they’re right. It’s fine if religion influences your moral values. But, when you make public arguments, you have to ground them–as much as possible–in reason and evidence, things that are accessible to people of different religions, or no religion at all. Otherwise, you can’t persuade other people, and they can’t persuade you. In a diverse democracy, there must be a common political language, and that language can’t be theological.

That’s what I keep saying – and I keep being surprised at how much resistance there is to that idea among some intellectuals (those ‘educated’ people again). But it seems so obvious. If you tell me a given piece of legislation would be a good thing because Moloch says so, why should that carry any weight with me? Why would you expect it to? Why should it make any difference if you substitute the generic word ‘God’ for Moloch? They both mean the same thing, after all – ‘the deity I have decided to believe in’. It’s just not reasonable to expect other people to believe in the supernatural being you have chosen to believe in, therefore that being’s word doesn’t carry any weight in public political discussions. Or rather it shouldn’t. Of course, when people use the word used by the majoritarian religion for its deity, they think they are referring to someone that everybody ought to pay attention to – but that’s a kind of trick of the light, an illusion, caused by familiarity and failure to question. And then that illusion goes on to become resentment and truculence.

What many conservatives are now saying is that, since certain views are part of evangelicals’ identity, harshly criticizing those views represents discrimination…Identity politics is a powerful thing–a way of short-circuiting debate by claiming that your views aren’t merely views; they are an integral part of who you are. And who you are must be respected. But harsh criticism is not disrespect–and to claim it is undermines democratic debate by denying opponents the right to aggressively, even impolitely, disagree. That is what conservatives are doing when they accuse liberals of religious bigotry merely for demanding that the Christian Right defend their viewpoints with facts, not faith.

Just so. That’s that special status for religion thing that I keep mentioning. Harsh criticism is not disrespect, and pretending it is is a way of trying to rule out disagreement. Exactly. Of course, it works, so needless to say conservatives are going to go right on doing it, and accusing atheists and secularists of elitism into the bargain, but at least the rest of us can point out how bogus it all is.

Check out this interview with Jane Kramer in the New Yorker. She says some things that it would be good to see said more often, by more people, more forthrightly.

But in France, with all its freedoms, so many young women seem to be capitulating to Islamist pressure. It usually starts with the young men who are recruited, and the symbols of successful recruitment are the women in the family. In other words, the women are the symbol of the new identity of the man. When you see a twelve-year-old girl coming to school in a chador, where for two or three generations no one had worn one, you have to look at this as the expression of an enormous pressure from the men in the girl’s family. You’re really dealing with a born-again movement, and the girls get the short end of the stick, because the boys don’t have to change what they study, how they dress, and so forth. The girls are the proof of the new purity of the family.

Just so. The boys get to go right on dressing as they like, the girls have to turn themslves into symbols. As usual – yawn yawn, same old same old. Men are people, women are things; men get to have autonomy, women don’t; men apply pressure, women become symbols.

Homa Arjomand is in Victoria today to give a speech against the introduction of Sharia law in Ontario. I hope she gets a huge turnout and a lot of press coverage.

On the other hand. One letter to the Independent on the ‘Charles tells lower orders to stay in their places’ matter makes an interesting point.

How ironic that on the same day that Charles Clarke says that Prince Charles is out of touch for commenting that children want to be pop stars and the like without having to do anything to earn it, he chooses to announce that “every school must take its fair share of unruly pupils”. As a supply teacher in this country for the past two years, I think that, at least in this instance, it is Mr Clarke who seems more out of touch than the Prince. When was the last time Mr Clarke was in a classroom? There are many disruptive students who ruin it for the good children. From my experience, these disruptive ones fit the description given by the Prince, thinking that they don’t need an education as they will make it as pop stars or footballers in their teens and early twenties.

The letter-writer then suggests that disruptive students should be isolated so that no school would have to deal with them in their disruptive state, and he points out the burden those disruptive students are to both teachers and students who want to learn. Which is true. That’s a conversation I’ve had more than once with various friends who are teachers – the fact that they often have to spend more time being a cop than being a teacher, and how bad that is for the students who don’t need policing and would rather learn something, as well as for the teachers themselves. Teaching is teaching, not crowd control, not prison guarding, not military basic training. Teachers should be able to devote their energies to teaching their subject matter, not struggling to establish dominance. It’s a waste of everyone’s time and energy to make teachers do that, plus it’s a hell of a good way to discourage people from being teachers at all. If I ran the world, students would either act like students or leave.

However, Charles was talking about his adult secretary, not school children, and he’s still a prat.