Thursday, March 12, 2015

Anscombe Society event


On April 11, I’ll be giving the Princeton Anscombe Society 10th Anniversary Lecture, on the subject “Natural Law and the Foundations of Sexual Ethics.”  Prof. Robert George will be the moderator.  Details here.

254 comments:

  1. Re your third question: It has already been addressed.

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  2. Santi said...

    DNW:

    Your syncretism of Ayn Rand and Thomism is wearing thin. Gays actually make more money on average than other Americans. They're hardly spongers on the system. And they don't need your permission to have equal rights or to marry. They need the permission of the courts-- They're taxpaying citizens. You're not better than them; you're not in a privileged position in relation to them.

    ... your notion that I'm a postmodern relativist, that's not accurate. ... there are a lot of things that we can say with confidence are objectively true--such as evolution, wide sexual variation in primates, species defined by irreducible variations along continuums, and that Auschwitz occurred.

    I'm actually bringing these forward and saying that one's theories about what's natural and reasonable; what sex is for; and whether God is moral, ought to be responsive to actual reality testing in relation to these.

    March 29, 2015 at 10:29 PM"



    Is every politically progressive clown in this country descended from such servile antecedents that his only familiarity with ideas centered on liberty and self-responsibility come from the shock of having encountered Ayn Rand in high school? Santi, didn't your own parents and grandparents and much more remote ancestors know and live liberty and self-responsibility?

    If not, what could they be worth as moral beings, much less as men? If not, what would your own doctrine of evolution have to "say" about that?

    But that problem, if it is a problem, is not your only problem.

    When it comes to basic reasoning, you demonstrate yourself both emotionally and intellectually incapable of dealing with the obviously redounding logical implications of your own theories of class membership.

    For example, your adverting to elevated homosexual income levels, in relation to anything I have actually stated, is simply irrelevant.

    Why is it irrelevant? Because you have established no objective context in which consideration of anyone's subjective impulsions are inter-subjectively mandated as respect and sacrifice worthy.

    Sometimes you blithely talk of your pets as an essentially and objectively different moral kind merely inhabiting the same landmass; sometimes as an objectively like-kind with the same life interests and alliance strategies, yet somehow essentially different.

    You are forced into this self-contradictory position because there is no way for you to reconcile the contradictions. Your stupid recourse to your continuum obsession as if it had morally injunctive implications, has placed blinders on you so severe (see the diabetes "discussion") that you cannot even admit the reality of genetic defects or autogenic disorders.

    Because once you allow that, the floodgates of objective standards open up, and the logical consequences of admitting these norms for health wash over your little kingdom of intellectual lunacy and wipe it right out.

    I wonder how long that stupid belief in self-validating variations would last if your child was diagnosed with Thalassemia instead of announcing to you that she was homosexual. (And before you wax indignant please remember that you brought your kids into this for purposes of illustration)

    You know all this damned well. Which is why after once setting up your premises, you flee from their self-undermining entailments and switch rhetorical footing; choosing to harp instead to your kumbayaist pansexual hippie bonobo LOVE INC. tune.

    You are caught between the intellectual Scylla of admitting that, say, lactase persistent humans owe no sacrificial consideration to hungry kinds who have not the same ability; and the Charybdis of somehow objective moral norms.

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  3. With regard to natural law theorizing (what constitutes rational or natural behavior for an individual), contemporary Thomists are not, in my view, taking proper account of the fact that, in the higher species of animals, FORM DOES NOT DRIVE THE EVOLUTION OF BEHAVIOR, BEHAVIOR DRIVES THE EVOLUTION OF FORM.

    Put another way, if a population of animals only took its cue to behavior from its existing form, its evolution would stall.

    Whether it's the flamingo's "smile," the panda's thumb, or the bonobo female's huge clitoris (which most characteristically gets rubbed on other females for pleasure and group bonding, countering male power in the species), behavioral variation--not playing to type or form--drives the evolution of form. Behavioral variation drives morphological change, not the other way around.

    This is one of the cardinal rules of evolutionary biology. It's been known for more than a century.

    Put yet another way, if you behave differently from your given form, and that behavior proves beneficial to the species, it puts evolutionary pressure on the form to adapt to the new behavior (as with the bonobo's ever enlarging clitoris).

    Another example: before you'll get shallow sea-dwelling creatures with their bellies oriented to the sand, you'll first get fish swimming sideways. A disorder, you might say, but not from the vantage of evolution. In the right environment, it could prove to be an advantage that drives morphological reorganization.

    Yet another example: before you'll get a whale, you'll first get a hairy land mammal oriented in an obsessive and uncharacteristic way (in relation to its form) to winning pleasure and food from the sea. The first step in the process might be little more than behaviorally dropping an aversion to water. The variations without the aversion might do better over time.

    So when Aquinas proposed 700 years ago that the clues to one's behavior should be read off of one's forms--the penis is for reproduction only, etc.--he didn't know Darwin. He didn't know the role behavioral variation plays in driving the evolution of forms.

    We now know that Aquinas had essence/accident turned exactly the wrong way around in relation to how a new species actually comes into existence. A lot of offspring have to play against type. There is no golden mean of form to conform to; there are only irreducible contingent variations in behavior along a continuum, many of them tugging at the most common usages of form in that species.

    Nature doesn't miss a bet. Behavioral variation is how Nature keeps its bets open.

    So when the natural law theorist says it's irrational or unnatural to not play (or conform) to an average or characteristic type, he's not taking proper account of how God plays against type--against form--to bring about new species.

    Aquinas couldn't have known this. Contemporary Thomists don't have that excuse. And it bears directly on irreducible sexual variation along a continuum. What's rational and natural in sex cannot reasonably be said to be confined to a narrow and golden mean--the penis is for reproduction; the clitoris for stimulation only in the missionary position, etc. Evolution is more complicated than reading a narrow range of behaviors off of an attenuated and impoverished definition of form.

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  4. Santi said...

    DNW:

    Your syncretism of Ayn Rand and Thomism is wearing thin. "



    Rand it appears is the big bugbear of progressive nightmares. They certainly bring her up with regularity if you express the least indifference to their fates.

    So, just for the hell of it, let's explicitly note that nowhere have I quoted I am quite certain, nor even paraphrased (as I suppose her to be) Ayn Rand.

    As far as I am aware, neither have I quoted St Thomas.

    Though my contempt for the intellectual substance of Santi's position is clear enough, it is also clear enough that my main and persistent interest is in having it clealy explained how he infers his supposed socially injunctive moral conclusions from his stated anthropological premisses.

    Something he has never successfully done. Something he has come close to, if not outright admitted that he cannot do, given his own assumptions.

    And whereas Santi the Indignant, has cited Rorty, and cited the very text which I quoted the despicable Rorty from; I nowhere cited or quoted Rand ... or Thomas for that matter

    Nor, to belabor the matter, neither did I state that Santi was a postmodernist.

    I instead stated that he was using a rhetorical technique common to many of them; and that he cannot on his own terms say how his ideas of moral obligation relate to his notions of universals.

    Santi's obvious hypersensitivity to the mildest allusions to the progressivist agenda and collectivist leanings as informing his philosophical positions, seems to be quite unreasonable in the face of his hippie-bonobo fate for mankind fantasies, and his harping that "no man is an island" theme so often.

    Questions, of which - politics or philosophy - actually constitutes the cart and which the horse, or whether Santi was just born leaning that way aside; it is clear that when Santi rails at the mere mention of a certain theme, he is objecting to a labeling which he has himself publicly proclaimed and repeatedly embraced. Here.

    Figure that one out.

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  5. A second big issue for natural law theorists that has not yet come up here is what it means for an individual to be rational or act "naturally" in a radically different environment from what your species has hitherto known.

    For a whole variety of good reasons, for example, the human variation of being gay or lesbian thrives most "naturally" in the concrete jungles of democratic countries--a radically different environment from Aquinas' time, or from hunter-gathering periods, etc.

    3-6% of every major city in the United States consists of gays and lesbians (on the high end is San Francisco at 6%, and at the low end is Pittsburgh at 3%).

    And their communities thrive. Salt Lake City, for example, has a large gay and lesbian community (4.7%).

    And demographers tell us that by the end of this century, 90% of all humans on the planet will live in cities. 90%.

    If gays and lesbians constitute even just 2% of each major city's population at the end of the century, it may suggest that God retains this degree of sexual variation in humans for good reasons (beyond simple reproduction).

    Maybe God likes gay and lesbian people. Maybe they're an integral part of the human future.

    Perhaps, for example, gays and lesbians empower the females of the species generally, aligning with them and equalizing power against heterosexual males in a way that is beneficial to urban dwelling populations in general.

    Maybe God likes that.

    The persistence of gays and lesbians, even against historic oppression, suggests something beneficial to the species is at work in retaining the variation--even apart from urban environments.

    Gay and lesbian communities are part of the urban ecology of the 21st century--and humans dwelling in urban ecologies is the human future. You can't just cut off 1-2% of urban populations, and stigmatize them as disordered. Women voters, for one, won't let that happen.

    So reason and nature are not being defended when one ignores the continuum of human sexual behavior, and the benefits that this continuum might confer in equalizing power among the sexes in unique environments--like the concrete jungle.

    No other mammal (except perhaps on factory farms) gathers in such huge numbers as humans do in cities. It's a whole different ballgame from all the environments that have come before. Just as you don't know what women are for, you don't know what gay and lesbian people are for--most especially when the environment their variation exists in shifts dramatically.

    Here's a link to a NYT article on the percentage of gay populations in major American cities.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/21/upshot/the-metro-areas-with-the-largest-and-smallest-gay-population.html?abt=0002&abg=1

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  6. contemporary Thomists are not, in my view, taking proper account of the fact that, in the higher species of animals, FORM DOES NOT DRIVE THE EVOLUTION OF BEHAVIOR, BEHAVIOR DRIVES THE EVOLUTION OF FORM.

    That's because your view is garbage. You clearly do not undertsand what Thomism claims and frankly probably not evolution either. But when people point this out to you, you ignore them and complain how mean people are to you.

    Put another way, if a population of animals only took its cue to behavior from its existing form, its evolution would stall.

    I retract my "probably".

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  7. One of the small compensatory satisfactions that result from protracted exchanges of this sort, is eventually seeing one's inferences as to the ulterior (if barely) political motivations and agendas of some partisans, confirmed outright by those same persons.

    Now, it may not be much of a stretch to conclude that when someone who probably aligns himself with the, "The personal is the political" viewpoint, argues for transforming humanity into pansexual hippie bonobos, that he actually values such an outcome personally; and that it is less about an inference they are making concerning the Tide of History, than their personal tastes.

    What is somewhat less apparent at first though, is how little if at all, the impulsion behind the arguments are even "moral" in any meaningful classically liberal, (i.e., logically distributive) sense.

    Eventually, even the pretense that the so-called benefits predicted as flowing from the progressive's desired sociopolitical transformations will be distributive in any logical sense, disappears from the progressive's harangues.

    All those previous rhetorical deployments which feigned an indifferently distributive application of "the good" - using the language of equality, of reciprocity, of fairness - are revealed as mere linguistic stalking horses, meant to distract and delay reaction until it is "too late".

    The Thomist or conservative generally believes in real kinds with common interests around which alliances and associations naturally develop. The progressive merely mouths the classically liberal platitudes as part of its program of intra-species war waged by covert means.

    "One law for the lion & ox is oppression!" says the "progressive. Except when the progressive taxes the lion to pay for the alcoholic ox's liver transplant.

    You cannot talk to these people. You can only talk about, and deal with, them

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  8. Notice that Anonymous neither states what it is that he thinks Thomism claims surrounding natural law and lesbianism--and why--nor what he thinks evolutionary biology teaches about form following behavior.

    Like Scott and Glenn, yet another advocate of Thomism fails to offer any evidence that he can actually sustain and support in a paragraph or more positive counter-claims.

    Of course, the reason is obvious: there is the danger of sunlight, scrutiny, and deconstruction.

    Easier to point and snark--and safer.

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  9. Yes, Santi, that's it exactly. That, not your own behavior, is the reason you can no longer find even a single person on this blog willing to address your claims and questions with so much as a grain of seriousness. The fault is not yours; it is ours.

    We confess, Santi. We are, every last one of us, so terrified of you as an arbiter of Thomistic arguments that none of us will again dare to produce one where your keen eyes can penetrate to its nakedness.

    We had thought, Santi, that there were some among us with expertise in Thomism. But we did not fear them, Santi, as we have come to fear you, for they have never demolished our arguments as you have. The learning of those we had thought "experts" is as dust compared to your own erudition.

    We fear the refining fire of your insight, Santi. Who can abide the day of your coming? Who shall stand when you appear? We shall burn under your sunlight; we shall wither beneath your scrutiny; our walls shall crumble at the merest touch of your deconstruction.

    So yes, Santi, from now on all you can expect from any of us is pointing and snarking, and even that only from those who bother to respond at all; many, perhaps most, will simply remain silent. (Well, except for the occasional bit of snickering.)

    And that being so, Santi, cast no more of your pearls before swine. Shake the dust from your feet, Santi, and leave—leave to the Day of Judgment!—this wicked place where none will receive you or heed your words.

    Go, Santi. Go and trouble yourself over us no more. Let your departure be a mark of our condemnation, your absence a foretaste of our punishment.

    Please.

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  10. Notice that Anonymous neither states what it is that he thinks Thomism claims

    Of course I didn't, that wasn't what my post was about. Or did you once again miss the whole point of what somebody said to you? Why should I give you free tutoring anyway, you never listened to Scott or Glenn or anyone one else who tried explaining it to you. My post was about your lack of understanding about both Thomism and evolution, and I supported it with actual evidence by quoting your own words. The fact that you're once again trying to change the topic suggests that I struck a little too close to comfort for you.

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  11. Glenn:

    You asked, "'How do you know--what gives you the hubris and presumption to know--that' a variation is not -- either itself or a precusor to -- a deviation from 'God's ultimate purposes?'"

    That's a great question, but you also know the answer. Ultimately, I don't know, and you don't know. After special creation has been displaced by contingent evolution as God's method of creating species, and after Auschwitz, what can anybody really comprehend of God's ultimate purposes (if God exists at all)?

    That's why I brought up both Darwin and Auschwitz. It's hubris and presumption after Darwin and Auschwitz to pretend to know what God wants or what God's moral center of gravity is ("the essence of the penis is reproduction, therefore..."). All such reading off of God's will from nature's forms, after Darwin and Auschwitz, is a human game; a contrivance; a presumption; a hubris--and, of course, question begging.

    But I'll offer a few things that are desirable (whether God exists or not): love, justice, flourishing, increasing the circle of empathy, and solidarity.

    If a behavior increases these, I'm prepared to wager that God is not wholly displeased--though who can know after Auschwitz what God could possibly be thinking?

    But if God is love, s(he) could hardly be wholly displeased with gay and lesbian equality and marriage. They meet these criteria. Affirming gay rights makes everyone a better person; it opens the windows on closed and dank emotional rooms, not just in gay people's hearts, but our own.

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  12. Maybe empathy is not the way to go. Maybe Aquinas' intellect separated from empathy is correct. He, after all, was quite tough on Jews without apparent pangs of conscience. He called them "Christ-killers" (Occisores Christi), and believed that God had willed supersessionism on the Jews for killing Christ (the Church replaces Israel). So perhaps Aquinas, the strictly logical fellow that he was, would say of Auschwitz that the Jews had it coming to them. Who knows what Aquinas would have said of Auschwitz?

    But I think Aquinas' anti-Semitism stains his whole legacy--and concretely illustrates its folly. Nobody who closes their hearts to racism, anti-Semitism, or women's inequality is on a path that's moving them closer to God (in my view), and I think it's true as well for those who have hardened their hearts to gay and lesbian equality and marriage. If God exists, intellect divorced from close attention to empathy is not a path to God.

    So to oppose, as Aquinas did, love between two men or two women, it's difficult to ground it in positive emotions. All you've really got is appeal to religious authority and "natural law," two dubious epistemic constructs, not reason.

    Thus appeals to natural law (in my view) are dishonest about sex. Contemporary Thomists are really just proscribing sex in accord with religious authority, period. Natural law is the window dressing. They equate natural law with reason because reason has the sheen of legitimacy that religion no longer has. Religious prohibition seems arbitrary--and who wants to seem arbitrary?

    But natural law is not reason, it's rationalization. And it's often heartless, walling off people from one another--and, by guilt, turning sexual desire, variation, and otherness into an emotional dungeon.

    And other doctrines--like original sin--shouldn't just produce guilt and self-hatred, but be a source of humility--not presumption or hubris.

    If Christianity is true, humility should bring one to the cross, wrestling with evolution and Auschwitz, and imagining oneself in the shoes of gay and lesbian people. There shouldn't be arrogant, smug, confident, and pat answers to such question as Auschwitz and gays. A state of doubt about what God really wants for gay and lesbian people follows an honest wrestling with evolution, Auschwitz, and empathy.

    Unfortunately, after Auschwitz, we don't even know whether God is moral--unless you're ready to get Orwellian about what goodness is, as Scott apparently is. God, according to Scott, doesn't have to answer to anybody.

    But that's no answer. It's a cop out. The question mark ought to be the new cross; the new way to interact with Jesus. Doubt gives gay and lesbian people space to flourish as themselves. Maybe their existence is just part of the healthy continuum of human sexuality--and if it's not, God will sort that out. At least you haven't iced up your heart with intellect and erected hate on them, harming your own soul.

    If you adopt an empathic attitude--as Aquinas might have done toward Jews, women, and gays, but didn't--even if you're being over-indulgent about an issue, at least your heart is staying open to love.

    Pope Francis is trying to keep an open mind and heart about the lives of gays and lesbians--"Who am I to judge?"--and surely any God worth wanting to love--and worthy of human love--can hardly be too angry at those who erred in life on the side of love. Jesus hung out with sinners.

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  13. It's a positive feedback cycle, guys.

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  14. Notice that Scott managed to get out more than three sentences, and appears to take great comfort in hiding behind the royal "we," but made no argument in support of his views on God's moral nature, evolution, Auschwitz, or empathy in relation to natural law.

    He also never attempted a defense, in a direct and sustained manner, of why two lesbian women in their forties, their kids grown, their husbands dead, shouldn't be able to marry one another within the Catholic Church.

    Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever?

    Thomism is not rocket science. None of its concepts are especially complicated. What it has is the Oz curtain. (Pretend your interlocutors don't understand the nuance of your actual position, make it about them, point, hand-wave, change the subject, etc.).

    But once Thomists start attempting to support directly, and in a sustained manner, their specific positions attached to specific instances, the structure falls of itself.

    It's not me bringing anything down, it's the weakness of Thomism itself. The very formulating of arguments in favor of its position on lesbian marriage (for example) falter on the least probing and scrutiny.

    So even as a Thomist in these threads might be tempted to write a defense of a specific position as applied to a specific instance, his nerve fails. He knows he's going to have to question beg, or wall off reality testing utterly, or appeal to authority, etc.

    It just crumbles.

    So the Thomist tends to talk around an issue--or show huffiness and impatience. Or better yet: he simply loses himself in the tight box of a closed room with someone who already shares his premises. No air gets in, no air gets out.

    What's the secret password? Go read so-and-so first.

    Appeal to general principles to outsiders MIGHT be offered, but without grappling with specific instances in a vulnerable way (Auschwitz, two widowed women with kids grown in their forties, etc.).

    Brief responses function as the technique for shooing off dissenters. "Here's the general principle, and so-and-so has already answered your question, but come back when you've read so-and-so...")

    It's a shell game.

    And woe to the person who wants a direct and sustained answer to a specific question.

    In Plato, Socrates probes people's claims with simple questions, and they actually attempt to answer them. They don't say to Socrates, "Its already been answered, you need to read so-and-so, etc...."

    Imagine Socrates on a Socratic walk with Scott, trying to get him to answer a direct question. Who wouldn't smile? "Really, it's not like Feser hasn't already answered you're question, Socrates! I'm suspicious of you're motive in even asking the question! If you had read so-and-so, you would know it's not even a good question...."

    And meanwhile, none of the questions ever get, you know, responded to directly. No vulnerable dialogue of any length actually occurs.

    Zardoz.

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  15. Anonymous:

    Are you actually going to get around to supporting your claims? You claimed, for instance, I'm wrong that variant behavioral change doesn't precede and drive change in biological form in evolution (a hugely important point in relation to essence/accident and the whole premise under-girding Thomistic natural law--that one should conform in behavior to a golden mean or average for your species).

    Explain please.

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  16. Santi,

    That's a great question, but you also know the answer. Ultimately, I don't know, and you don't know.

    Right. So, as you find yourself without reason (to believe what you hear from our side of the gulf), we with reason find ourselves (not being guided by the caterwauling from your side of it).

    - - - - -

    In deference to Anonymous' gentle guidance... snip, snip.

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  17. "[Y]ou never listened to Scott or Glenn or anyone one else who tried explaining it to you."

    It does seem that Santi has trouble recognizing a direct answer to a direct question. I wonder whether that has anything to do with why he doesn't receive them any more.

    Still, it's odd that he seems to think his own problem is widespread. I can't offhand think of anyone else who has any trouble eliciting direct (and, when appropriate, sustained) answers from either me or Glenn (any more than Santi himself did, back before we found out that he was just going to ignore them). It seems poor judgment for him to aim his theatrics at an audience that already knows better.

    But yeah, positive feedback cycle. Glenn, may I borrow those snips?

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  18. Yes, Scott, because what you believe is soooo sophisticated, nuanced, and complicated, and you've already deigned to explain in a few sentences once, and if one can't infer the details on the rest, well, you'll be behind the Oz curtain making it about me.

    You never did put together a sustained paragraph in defense of your position that two lesbian widows in their forties, their kids grown, should not be married in the Catholic Church. Might you actually try?

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  19. Glenn,

    Why don't you come out from behind the Oz curtain and attempt a sustained defense of your views on natural law in relation to evolution, and why you think what I've said in this thread is wrong?

    I've put myself out there. How about you? Where am I wrong, and why?

    How about attempting a sustained answer to the lesbian women in their 40s question that I've posed to Scott? Let's see how your mind works without being in hiding or propped up by pointing to something Feser said.

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  20. Scott,

    But yeah, positive feedback cycle. Glenn, may I borrow those snips?

    [Gently wipes the dust from the several extra snips that he has...]

    Indeed you may.

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  21. Santi: " Jesus hung out with sinners."

    Saying: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. "

    And

    "And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, ... For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh ...."

    And finally the Bard, on Santiian strategies:

    Mark you this, Bassanio,
    The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
    An evil soul producing holy witness
    Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
    A goodly apple rotten at the heart ....


    So repent. And go and sin no more.

    Or at least quit trying to pass your deceptions off as truth.

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  22. It is a bit like arguing with the devil, though I can't imagine the devil being quite so shameless. Pull back the Oz curtain on Santi and he just keeps going like nothing happened.

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  23. Scott says: It does seem that Santi has trouble recognizing a direct answer to a direct question. I wonder whether that has anything to do with why he doesn't receive them any more.

    Still, it's odd that he seems to think his own problem is widespread. I can't offhand think of anyone else who has any trouble eliciting direct (and, when appropriate, sustained) answers from either me or Glenn (any more than Santi himself did, back before we found out that he was just going to ignore them). It seems poor judgment for him to aim his theatrics at an audience that already knows better."



    No you don't wonder really. You've read that sack of shit Rorty's, "Contingency, irony, and solidarity" and it is obvious that Santi is taking his strategy straight out of it.

    It is not a strategy that uses dialectic in order to refine concepts and approach an objective truth waiting to be discovered. In the Rortian view, there is no such thing.

    The Santiian therefore adopts the method of transgression, rhetoricizing, appealing to emotions and "play" as the fundamental elements of world making. Those, and lying about what Christian scriptures actually say.

    Thomism as he sees it, is merely a practice; one he wishes to attack and overthrow because it so effectively (in an intellectual sense) sets up the kinds of interpersonal claims boundaries he wishes were not there.

    As he cannot produce any objectively compelling reasons for you to sacrifice for him and his antipathetic ends, he cannot argue you out of these conclusions with logic.

    Therefore he will try to drown you out with rhetoric.

    From his point of view it doesn't matter that he is quoting mad men and fiction. Continuums .... variants ... all is one .... LOVE INC.

    It doesn't matter that he has taken one view of evolution advanced by an already discredited paleontologist, and tried to use it to buttress Ram Dassian nonsense. So what?

    For the proof of the Santiian pudding is not found in the form and soundness of the argument and its supposed entailments, but in how effective the constant emission of Santiian noise has been in socially neutralizing your stance, and if possible demoralizing you from holding it in the first place.

    The great irony of course comes in when Santi threatens to deconstruct Thomism, yet poses as wounded when his Ram Dassian nonsense is interpreted in light of Darwinian parasitical camouflage and subversion strategies employed by the weak as they seek to insinuate themselves among the productive; and cynically turn the efforts of the productive to their own benefit.

    Then, he protests, it's not really about a sham Christianity used to develop the opposite of a Christian life, but it is really, really really all about "LOVE INC." circles of inclusion, "flourishing" and half a dozen other banal slogans and cliches he cannot himself justify as interpersonally obligating in any objective sense.

    But then, on his own view, he doesn't have to do that hard work. He can just assert that everyone will be better off when everyone is forced to fund, and attend, the lepers' orgy and suicide party.

    No he does not have to prove a thing according to any objective standards.

    Only you, do.

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  24. DNW:

    Your quotes and thoughts countering my "even Jesus hung out with sinners" statement were great. I agree that the Bible does not support my views on marriage--that it's a reactionary text in many respects, both as to gays and women--and that you provided proper context for reminding us of that.

    I shouldn't have quoted or referenced the Bible in such a decontextualized way.

    With regard to you (and Anonymous) likening me to the devil, however, I would ask you to recall that Jesus, in the Gospel of John, hurled similar abuse at Jews ("you are of your father the devil, etc.")--so I'm hardly in poor company.

    Given the grotesque and historic harm anti-Judean passages like those in John have had on subsequent history, contemporary Catholics (one would think) might be reticent to hurl devil-oriented vituperation and epithets at other scapegoats (liberals, gays, feminists, agnostics, atheists, etc.).

    But you don't seriously believe the devil and his angels really exist, do you? You're just being rhetorical, right? You don't think God burns people in hell--or am I wrong about that? Do you take such beings literally?

    I've always thought the Sadducees, who were suspicious of the literalism of both Jesus and the Pharisees on things like bodily resurrection, were the most sensible of the religious factions in Israel in the first century. Jesus called them in Matthew (if I recall) "a brood of vipers."

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  25. Santi said:

    DNW:

    Your quotes and thoughts countering my "even Jesus hung out with sinners" statement were great.


    Thank you. But you have misquoted yourself here as well. You have done so by introducing the term "even" as a - presumably - misplaced adverb; and thus, the sense of the view you were originally trying to convey is weakened.

    Your original Jesus comment was formulated as a categorical and offered as rhetorical punctuation.

    Thus:

    "Francis is trying to keep an open mind and heart about the lives of gays and lesbians--"Who am I to judge?"--and surely any God worth wanting to love--and worthy of human love--can hardly be too angry at those who erred in life on the side of love. Jesus hung out with sinners."


    As we can readily see therefore, the Jesus statement followed remarks with which you meant to convey the impression that Francis was not merely withholding judgement as to the sincerity of sinners expressing a desire to obediently pursue a clerical path; but, that Francis condoned, and by insinuation Jesus, condoned and consorted approvingly.


    "I agree that the Bible does not support my views on marriage--"

    The purpose of my quote was not to demonstrate that "the Bible" does not support your views, but that the person of Jesus recorded in the canonical scriptures most definitely disagrees.


    ... that it's a reactionary text in many respects ...

    The scriptures themselves contain many passages referring to their discordance with the values of what it terms, "the World" or the Age. This is nothing new to you is it? It is all through the New Testament


    And that the Jews condemned temple prostitution; that they refused to worship to the state symbolized by the genius of the ruler; that they were condemned by pagans for their views on marriage and abortion and infanticide ... none of this is new to you is it?

    So I guess you would have to admit that the religion of Yahweh has been "reactionary" right from the start; and will always remain so, so long as it remains the worship of Yahweh.


    " ... both as to gays and women--and that you provided proper context for reminding us of that.

    I shouldn't have quoted or referenced the Bible in such a decontextualized way."


    One wonders why, knowing that, that you did nonetheless.

    Any explanation?

    ReplyDelete
  26. Santi said...

    " DNW:


    ... With regard to you (and Anonymous) likening me to the devil, however, I would ask you to recall that Jesus, in the Gospel of John, hurled similar abuse at Jews ("you are of your father the devil, etc.")--so I'm hardly in poor company."


    He also said, "Get Thee behind me Satan", to Peter; who became the "rock" upon which the Church was founded. And you are obviously neither Peter, nor in, nor of, his company.


    "Given the grotesque and historic harm anti-Judean passages like those in John have had on subsequent history ..."


    Your terminology is deficient here. John is not anti-Judean. That would be someone who is anti people from Judea.



    "...contemporary Catholics (one would think) might be reticent to hurl devil-oriented vituperation and epithets at other scapegoats (liberals, gays, feminists, agnostics, atheists, etc.)..."


    I would not claim to have an authoritative understanding or even to know very much about what Catholics, contemporary or otherwise, might be reticent to do.

    And as I have stated before: for the purposes of any discussion with agnostics or atheists here - or elsewhere for that matter - concerning points of logic, or value, or politics, I assume that the common default position, for the sake of argument, is that we are all atheists here.

    Now I do suppose that a good Catholic or a Christian who had what they believed to be an authentic insight into a state describable as "hell" would think it a great tragedy and themselves care, if you ended up there screaming in emotional agony and frustrated rage forever. Perhaps, then, that would at the least mean that I am not in that sense very good.


    " But you don't seriously believe the devil and his angels really exist, do you?"

    LOL. Do you believe in spiders?

    I believe nihilists both overt and covert exist; and that one has no further to go in order to find them than to dip into the libraries and texts of the deconstructionists and a half dozen other intellectual fashions, including strangely enough, the manifestos of secular humanism.


    " You're just being rhetorical, right? You don't think God burns people in hell--or am I wrong about that? Do you take such beings literally?

    Do you mean: a, do I affirm such a thing, or b, do I find it logically inconceivable?

    I will be happy to discuss this with you once you answer my question as to why you trotted out an out of context biblical reference, knowing that you should not have


    I've always thought the Sadducees, who were suspicious of the literalism of both Jesus and the Pharisees on things like bodily resurrection, were the most sensible of the religious factions in Israel in the first century. Jesus called them in Matthew (if I recall) "a brood of vipers."

    March 31, 2015 at 12:34 PM



    You might consider how "evolution" dealt with them. Not that evolution tells us anything about how things ought to be, eh? Or do you believe that it does?

    ReplyDelete
  27. DNW:

    Why did I trot out a biblical text? Sometimes I salivate to the more liberal passages in the Bible. I like 1 John 4:7-8, for example. And Micah 6:8. I suppose you would say I'm divorcing them from their context in just liking them--that they mean in their fuller context something less valuable to a secular person than I imagine.

    But I don't think it's good to leave the Bible strictly to the religious--especially fundamentalists. Atheists make a mistake in leaving the Bible to fundamentalists, letting them "own" it. It's like the American flag. Liberals shouldn't let conservatives "own" that either. The Bible is part of our collective cultural inheritance (as is, say, Shakespeare).

    But ultimately I agree with you that I quoted out of context in this instance. In retrospect, it was a combination of two factors: (1) pleasure at the thought that Jesus might have been kinder and more tolerant to some degree than he likely was; and (2) it was rhetorically punctual at the end of the thread comment.

    But natural law is premised on the idea that the good can be discovered by "natural reason." No appeals to authority need be made.

    But I will say there are far worse abuses of the Bible than making characters in it appear kinder and more tolerant than they might actually have been.

    For example, Peter said in Acts, "Silver and gold have I none," but the previous pope (Ratzinger) used to strut around the palaces of the Vatican in cute little red Prada shoes--while claiming to be the successor of Peter!

    Do you suppose Peter would have approved of Ratzinger's lifestyle? Now that's a contradiction.

    What's worse: me appropriating Jesus, implying he might have been gay tolerant; or Ratzinger, appropriating the non-materialist Peter?

    Do you know that Ratzinger retired to a palace on the Vatican grounds? Nice retirement.

    Which is a greater corruption of a plain reading of the gospels and Acts?

    ReplyDelete
  28. DNW:

    You said that I do "not have to prove a thing according to any objective standards.

    Only you, do."

    That's actually Scott's position surrounding God in relation to Auschwitz. He said God doesn't have to answer to anybody.

    So you've laid on me a straw man. I'm actually happy to set up objective criteria for evaluating things on a case-by-case basis.

    I think, for example, that there are objective criteria for having confidence as to whether or not something happened in history.

    "Converging lines of evidence" is one objective criterion for knowing what happened in the past.

    Thus I think there are "converging lines of evidence" that variant behavior drives the evolution of form, and that the Holocaust occurred, etc.

    What you want is an objective, non-question begging, moral standard from someone who doesn't know if God exists, but I think it's fair to say that the theist has the same question-begging problem after Auschwitz.

    You yourself have offered no ground for belief beyond the bald assertion that God exists. But you need additional steps to get to moral prohibition: "God exists, and is moral, and I know what God wants." You've offered no criteria for evaluating when we might know that you've actually made these three claims plausible--let alone demonstrated them.

    So the objective basis for your own moral proscriptions is lacking.

    One objective criterion on which I would hope to arrive at some objectivity surrounding, say, moral proscription on sexual behavior, would be this:

    --If we proscribe sexual behavior, is it evolutionarily informed?

    With regard to Thomistic sexual proscription, it fails on even this first objective criterion. It's the exact opposite of evolutionarily informed. It actually ignores evolution. It takes, for example, no account of the fact that variant behavior leads the evolution of form. It also fails to grapple with variation along a continuum as the engine of evolution. The whole essence-accident idea, with an ideal mean or average for an organism to shoot for, is rendered (to be generous) problematic by evolution.

    I could offer some other criteria for attempting to ground moral decision-making, but you get the idea.

    Natural law is not objective, but a historically generated classification game that pretends to be objective. It sets up some rules--and, well, garbage in, garbage out. It's a self-enclosed and self-fulfilling output system, first developed by Aristotle, larded with dubious premises that have spitted out, time and time again, ridiculous conclusions.

    Just think of how Aristotle reasoned in natural law terms about slavery and right and left-handedness, and Aquinas's reasoning about women. And think of 20th century Catholicism's endorsement of the "rhythm method" on natural law grounds. Again and again, it has led to silliness and worse, with often historically unsettling consequences.

    I see contemporary Thomists, by walling off natural law from the deliverances of what we've learned about biology since Darwin, as engaging in nostalgia for an old, old game. The Aristotle-Aquinas game they're playing may be comforting, but it isn't dealing with the world objectively.

    If you want to promote objectivity and oppose masturbation, start by abandoning the mental masturbation of natural law theorizing absent evolution. It's not objective, and it's closed-in on itself.

    ReplyDelete
  29. "You never did put together a sustained paragraph in defense of your position that two lesbian widows in their forties, their kids grown, should not be married in the Catholic Church."

    Nor is there any reason why I would, since (a) I've never claimed to hold that "position" in the first place, (b) I'm not Catholic, (c) I'm not hubristic enough to tell the Church what it should or shouldn't do with its own sacraments, and at any rate (d) I'm not on call to answer to your shrill, petulant demands.

    But I do understand why that's the Church's "position"—and so, by now, should you. There's nothing difficult to understand about the Church's sexual ethics, and although I'm not yet 100% on board with them myself (despite my general agreement with a natural-law basis for ethics), I'm generally happy to explain why I think they're coherent, defensible, deserving of tremendous respect, and very possibly correct—and not vulnerable to the sort of sophomoric objections raised against them by, for example, you—to anyone genuinely interested in what they say and why.

    You weren't, so I stopped and I'm not going to start again. It wouldn't help until and unless you mastered certain basics anyway, and you've shown no interest in doing that either despite the assistance of a number of well-meaning posters—including, but far from limited to, me. Those basics have been laid out for you repeatedly and you've been referred to other sources from which you can learn more. (And no, none of it is "soooo sophisticated, nuanced, and complicated." On the contrary, when I make fun of you it's generally for failing to grasp, or pretending not to grasp, some pretty simple and obvious stuff.)

    @Glenn:

    "Indeed you may."

    Thank you.

    Snip. Snip.

    ReplyDelete
  30. Notice Scott, that you were actually on the cusp of defending a specific claim, then cut bait. Too bad.

    You did say earlier in this thread that you support civil marriage, but not marriage within the Church--but it was in a single sentence and without elaboration.

    Whether out of deference to a religion not (yet) your own, or because you think the rationale of natural law surrounding gays and lesbians as formulated by Aquinas is highly defensible, I was hoping you would bat around a specific instance (two 40-something lesbians with kids grown and husbands dead--a hard case, I would think).

    But of course, you don't owe me any explanation.

    ReplyDelete
  31. Santi,

    Let's review, in what I hope to be a pejorative free manner

    Santi says

    "I could offer some other criteria for attempting to ground moral decision-making, but you get the idea. ..."

    No, actually I don't get anything other than that you are alluding to an argument you have not demonstrated, and a conclusion you have not established.

    I have earlier observed that you,

    - "cannot on ... [your] own terms say how ... [your] ideas of moral obligation relate to [your own] notions of universals."

    and that you, Santi,

    - " ... have established no objective context in which consideration of anyone's subjective impulsions are inter-subjectively mandated as respect and sacrifice worthy.

    and that Santi has never really,

    - " ... explained how he infers his supposed socially injunctive moral conclusions from his stated anthropological premisses."

    and that this is,

    - " Something he [Santi] has come close to, if not outright admitted that he cannot do, given his own assumptions."

    And regarding your moral claims,

    - "... how little if at all, the impulsion behind the arguments are even "moral" in any meaningful classically liberal, (i.e., logically distributive) sense."

    and that,

    " ... even the pretense that the so-called benefits predicted as flowing from the progressive's desired sociopolitical transformations will be distributive in any logical sense, disappears …"

    and,

    " ... [as The Santian] must admit that there is no objective "we", and that natures either don't exist or are so multifarious as to make men radically different and potentially life incompatible kinds; [the Santian himself] is what, and wants what, in the name of what, exactly?"

    and

    " if he would explain why he presumes to speak on behalf of the class of humans, or why he tacitly assumes - especially given his own views of variation - that they would share his needs or ideas of utility, then we might get somewhere ... eventually."

    However,

    " ...Even a cursory attempt to work out how the "good" of homosexuals' enjoyment of social claims staked out and leveled on their own terms of self-expression, against heterosexuals, then supposedly translates into the good of heterosexuals as well, reveals that: either the concept of good becomes frivolous or incoherent, or, that the very classifications used must be subverted in order that previous nature-classes' claims of interests, are sociopolitically neutered, marginalized or abolished."

    Continued ...

    ReplyDelete
  32. To continue ...

    and,

    "Isn't the demand by transitional forms and their apologists that non-transitional forms contribute to the enabling of what is an apparent maladaptation, a form of covert warfare on the non-transitionals?

    and thus,

    " ... in Santi's version of reality, the concept of “Good” simply collapses into incoherence. In a Santian reality without natures, or one with natures so multiplied and diverse (a “true” “homosexual nature”, a supposed “pederast nature”, an imagined “bestialist nature”) that historical species become arbitrary sortings, what could “good” even refer to in terms of broad social and life consequences? Are we sure that mere toleration, much less enabling solidarity and sacrifice has no odious costs?"

    and

    " ... if heterosexual natures, so obviously critical to the existence of humanity itself are not taken to be normative and morally injunctive, then why should homosexual natures - whether viewed as variants or discrete kinds - be socially privileged as a result of their existence, even if there were such a nature?"


    " ... the Santian claim is that oppressed or intermediate forms have a right of some kind to be recognized as entitled to their self-determination and expression.

    However, if this is true for the class of all existents of X category (however defined) including the transitionals, then, it follows, that it applies to the non-intermediate or non-transitional types as well. They have a right to their self-expression per definition or class membership. "

    Cont ...

    ReplyDelete
  33. Continuing,

    It is clear regarding Santi, that


    "1. He has not established that reproductive success or transitioning has any part in the existential justification he previously posits when he demands respect for his particular behavioral pets.

    If he does posit the reproductive success fact as posing a "real value" which it is somehow incumbent upon us to respect, he has again edged toward an Aristotelian-ism (of some sort) which will eventually undermine and devour his own argument.

    2. Nor has he shown:

    a, Why his hypothetical transitional form is actually anything like a real transition to another form rather than just another ultimately pointless differentiation. For to try (as alluded to earlier) and do so would be to reverse the efficient cause or random mutation impulsion(for lack of a more convenient word) behind the "evolutionary chain" and make it, if covertly, quasi-Aristotelian: justification by a kind of final cause or at least draw.

    b. How "variants" which are uncongenial to other variants [variants of what, exactly, we never find out] deserve social support."

    So to restate:

    "Under Santi's system of interpretation, there is not only no meaningful concept of "We" there is to repeat, no objective concept of "health". "

    and

    " ... assuming we do go on to shrug at the happy thrashing of these variants, on what grounds do you Santi, demand that others, indifferent to such practices, enable, support, and underwrite their continuance?"

    And regarding the “family resemblances” business, and its ultimate circularity,

    "You still have not stated exactly what, if anything other than your wishful thinking, you have based your "we" category on.

    Nor have you said just how you have selected or justify whatever attributes you have in mind as the class defining or conditioning attributes for the "we" you posit.

    Nor have you finally explained how you logically derive - apparent Humean that you are - your inclusivist moral imperatives from mere declarative statements."

    To further restate, you,

    " ... have yet to explain how your inclusivist moral imperatives are logically developed and derived from your classification system [whatever it might be, or however described] in any event.

    So,

    “Your ostensible system of moral obligation really does seem to be based on just what happens to please you, and others like you, rather than on a moral imperative that can be deduced for all of humankind."

    In which case,

    " ... we don't even have to concern ourselves with "species", as you talk of them, at all.

    and any

    "... reference to species becomes completely otiose."



    And finally, in what sense does "evolution" require that we respect and sacrifice for so-called "transitionals" (most often to nothing and nowhere).

    How does one get from the "fact" of speciation and mutations, to moral injunctions which enable or underwrite through self-sacrificial "solidarity" their "hijacking"?

    And if the so-called transitionals "hijack" the purposes of the body, why should not "non-transitionals" hijack evolution's “work” to their own purposes by increasing their own health and power while marginalizing the ability of so-called "transitionals" to subvert the quality and joys of their lives, and through tolerated transgressions, lessen their powers in the world?

    ReplyDelete
  34. In architecture, form follows function. As a business or family’s needs change and behavior patterns change, rooms might be added to an existing building, and in a way that suits the surrounding environment.

    In evolutionary biology, form follows behavior.

    What I've been suggesting in this thread is that essence/accident should be substituted with form follows behavior–and in humans, "form follows imagination." No golden mean or average to conform to, but forms following contingent pursuits of imagination and passion.

    ReplyDelete
  35. Santi said...

    ... In evolutionary biology, form follows behavior.

    What I've been suggesting in this thread is that essence/accident should be substituted with form follows behavior–and in humans, "form follows imagination." No golden mean or average to conform to, but forms following contingent pursuits of imagination and passion.
    April 1, 2015 at 3:23 PM




    Form follows behavior, eh? And all the while I thought it was environmental filtering. Or at least that lately they have been saying so.

    So under your theory then, how many generations would you say are likely to elapse before hopefully flapping your arms for some part of the day, would allow one of your descendants to finally take flight without artificial means?

    Probably many many generations and a pretty long time.

    After all, God-damned boy buggering perverts - not to mention sodomite pairs of more mature years - have been at it for thousands of years according to historians. To the best of your knowledge, have any of their victims ever given rise to a lineage that bore foeti in the colon?

    The one historical mention I can even recall to such a reference was found in Aristotle: wherein he reported the story of a tyrant whose slighting public remark to the effect that his victim might bear his child, so wounded the feelings of the formerly compliant catamite, that he turned on and slew his master.

    Or are you instead contemplating someone melding their genes with say, that of a bat?

    Is this what you might have in mind? http://www.beyondhollywood.com/posterx/gargoyles.jpg

    Ah, but then, to paraphrase myself yet once again: "Not that evolution tells us anything about how things ought to be in a morally obliging sense eh? Or do you in fact believe that evolution does lay moral obligations? "

    ReplyDelete
  36. "In architecture, form follows function.…In evolutionary biology, form follows behavior.

    What I've been suggesting in this thread…"

    …is therefore a return to Lamarckianism. Oops.

    In Darwinian evolutionary theory, "form" (in the relevant sense) unequivocally precedes function and behavior.

    ReplyDelete
  37. DNW:

    The premise underlying natural law is that the function of a thing can be read off of its form--and if behavior diverges from that function, it's disordered.

    In other words, Thomism is premised on looking at the "is" in biology, and reading off of it an "ought" of behavior.

    Please recall that it was Hume, responding to Thomism, who famously started the meme that no "ought" need follow from an "is."

    In the 21st century, even if you disagree with Hume, you can't just wall off an individual organism's biological form from evolution, dropping context.

    In other words, if you're going to read off "ought" from "is," you have to ask: What is this organism?

    And the answer is: a variant gambit.

    What sort of organism did God make this creature to be? Again: this organism is one contingent bet along the continuum of irreducible behavioral variations.

    Aquinas's error was to guess that there was a Golden Mean, an ideal, to which each individual organism ought to conform, not knowing that this is not what an individual organism is.

    No organism on Earth is made to conform to the logic of external programs or patterns, but to the contingent logic of its own internal program or behavioral pattern.

    If you blow that off, you're saying: I don't care how God actually uses diversity of behavior as the engine of evolution, I'm going to stick to the Golden Mean of that biological organ's form as the cue to universal and objective "right" behavior (the penis is for reproduction, period).

    But by declaring this, you haven't really generated an objective basis for behavior; you've only generated a contrivance that actually isn't paying the least attention to what an individual organism if for, which is gambling.

    One individual of a species might be laying down a conservative bet, and another might be laying down a risky bet.

    If somebody's betting on the brake, somebody else might be betting on the accelerator.

    The continuum of sexual diversity is nature not missing a bet. The continuum is preserved--including homosexuality--because it serves reproduction in some manner (not just directly, but indirectly).

    Example: gays and lesbians may function in humans as akin to the ever enlarging clitoris in female bonobos. Perhaps gays and lesbians help to equalize power between the genders by strongly aligning, temperamentally, with women against heterosexual men.

    If this is so, Homo sapiens may be successful in part because heterosexual alpha males do not have as much power to overwhelm group dynamics as compared to, say, chimps and gorillas.

    I'm just speculating, but evolution might preserve homosexual behavior in a population for reasons other than a direct contribution to reproduction. It might be an indirect contribution to a species success (shifting power dynamics between males/females, etc.)

    ReplyDelete
  38. What else could an ought possibly follow from? Add that to the ever-growing list of Hume's stupid statements.

    ReplyDelete
  39. Scott,

    Now we're making progress. Your Lamarckian observation is confused and flat out wrong in it's conclusion, but you're in exactly the right direction to have noticed the link.

    It's true that Lamarck first proposed this idea, but it's also true that this is precisely the one thing that contemporary evolutionary biologists understand him to have gotten correct.

    Behavior doesn't drive evolution in the way Lamarck imagined, but if you genetically inherit a behavioral inclination, and you start deploying that behavior--and it proves beneficial--the form of your descendants will evolve to fit the new behavior.

    Two examples from recent human evolution: raising cattle and living on high Tibetan mountains. By adopting these new behaviors, formal biological properties of the organism have started to follow the behavioral lead (ability to digest cow's milk ever more efficiently; ability of the lungs to extract oxygen from thinner air).

    Evolutionary biologists insist that this is exactly how new species evolve. Form follows behavior. At first the form is ill-fitted to the new behavior, then the form catches up.

    And this makes sense: a behavioral change can have large effects very quickly on prospects for survival, and can explore the selection landscape. Think of the "Darwin Awards"--by their behavior, individuals can select themselves out of the population quite quickly.

    But they can also win. Imagine a small group of cats on a ship that (not characteristic of the species) lack reticence to water--and then those cats find themselves stranded on a beach after a shipwreck. They might well survive on fish from the sea, and evolve into a new species, adapting to a new niche.

    And notice the interaction of behavior and environment here. They're the one-two punches of evolution. So it's the exact same principle with the environment as with behavior. Form follows environmental change. Form follows behavioral change.

    Put another way: novel behaviors explored in novel environments bring about novel selection pressures. A wide range--a wide continuum--of behaviors in a species help it explore the environmental niche and adaptation spaces.

    ReplyDelete
  40. Santi,

    Two points follow. The first concerns your dissembling language, the second regards the relevance of what you are calling "evolution".

    1. If you persist in haranguing us with blatantly purposive language, continue to anthropomorphize "evolution", and insist on talking of evolutionary “purposes” when the crux of your position is to deny the objective reality of purposes, then, it becomes impossible to even communicate with you.

    "Gambit", "what an individual organism if for, which is gambling", "If you blow that off, you're saying: I don't care how God actually uses diversity of behavior as the engine of evolution".

    That italicized matter is the kind of crap you have been shoveling for weeks now. And although atheist and materialist scientists and popularizers grant themselves a certain indulgence when using purposive language in relation to biology, it is understood, or they claim it should be understood, that they do not really mean it.

    Now, your remarkably hyperbolic, flowery, and probably intentionally obfuscating use of this kind of language in relation to "evolution" is just plain annoying.

    STOP IT, ALREADY! UNLESS YOU REALLY ARE POSITING "EVOLUTION" AS AN AGENT INTELLECT WITH ENDS AND MEANS!

    Are you or are you not proposing such a theory?

    Because there really is no justification whatsoever for you to so extravagantly persist in falsely attributing end-directed behaviors to blind forces, unless it is your purpose to intentionally supplant one God concept with another. The ordinary constraints of English vocabulary simply do not require you to blather on in such an exasperating, and on your own assumed premises, nonsensical, way. You are preposterously arguing on behalf of the "purposes" of an entity which neither has purposes, nor is an entity.


    2. A. Stripped of the teleological language which you have stolen from an Aristotelian framework ( one which you explicitly reject) in order to adorn your rhetoric, your subsequent references to a putatively incumbent respect for evolutionary "gambits" and "purposes" is pure - and quite annoying - nonsense.

    B. Once your own "evolution" rhetoric is stripped of this borrowed ornamentation, you are left with nothing but a natural process having neither direction nor preferred end, and which is not even a real "process" in any sense other than one reducible to materialist physics.

    (1). As with your shameless anthropomorphizing and borrowed teleology, you have been equally brazen when positing your own parodic form of a presumptively "evolution" based if morally inverted "natural law" .

    Because the absurdity of it all is so striking as well as annoying, you have been repeatedly challenged to establish the grounds by which some evolutionary outcomes are obligated to respect or support the existence of other quite possibly uncongenial or even subversive or antagonist outcomes.

    (2). You have never done so. Meaning that,
    (a),you either realize that your "hustling" and scam is logically indefensible; or
    (b), you are so Joe Biden-like, that you cannot even grasp the logical basis of the difficulty which involves you in this obvious absurdity in the first place.

    ReplyDelete
  41. With regard to form following behavior, it should also be noted that this principle works, not just in the service of change, but in the service of conservation: you can behaviorally search the adaptation space for environments that are sympatico to your already existing form if you want to, or you can push boundaries that will ultimately drive change in form.

    Put another way, plastic and wide-ranging behaviors can work to preserve forms and ways of life, or they can put pressure on forms and ways of life to change.

    For instance, a group of Amish can literally preserve their biological and cultural forms by behaviorally withdrawing from the selective pressures of novel environments (such as exposure to city chemicals, city behavioral practices, etc.). They can maintain a relationship with strictly rural and agricultural ways of being--never exposing themselves to the selective pressures of those living in, say, a concrete jungle.

    So think of the consequences of the Amish choice of behavior and environment in contrast with the city-dweller. If you're an Amish woman, why delay pregnancy? You can marry at 15 and have ten kids. You're not going to college. You don't need condoms or birth control pills. You don't need to regulate your fertility.

    The female city-dweller is in a different situation entirely, maybe not marrying until after graduate school, and being on the pill throughout her twenties. Maybe she'll have just one kid by artificial insemination--who ends up going to Harvard.

    Such choices impact the form of descendants in unpredictable ways over time. Who has the better evolutionary survival strategy? Time tells.

    But from the water-loving cat to the Amish hausfrau to the city-dwelling feminist, form tracks behavior, not the other way around. Whether behavior is deployed in the conserving of form or in putting pressures on existing forms, behavior and environment are highly (and potentially rapidly) plastic, and when these change, form begins to follow.

    You don't get a flying squirrel all of a sudden. First you get a squirrel who isn't afraid of leaping from trees--and a benefit accumulates from the doing of it--or not.

    ReplyDelete
  42. To recap then, Santi:

    - Regarding "evolution", you persistently anthropomorphize, and attribute ends and strategies to what are on your own terms blind and purposeless outcomes resulting from the collision of material forces.

    - You then leverage this nonsensical personification rhetoric in order to construct a sham teleology for the sham agent intellect.

    - You then, while endorsing the fact/value dichotomy behind the scenes, attempt through on-stage sleight of hand to insinuate that your appeals to forbearance and appreciation for species "variants" are based on the "purposes" or "gambles" of this evolution qua agent intellect. Thus, creating your own natural law pantomime and mythology, which you hope to erect in place of a natural law which you wish to overthrow for political reasons.

    But consistent with the principles of what is ostensibly your own worldview, this entire justificatory edifice of yours works out as a ludicrously flimsy deception: a deceit which is either unwittingly, or knowingly promoted.

    So: either you are Joe Biden-like, possessing a dull and goofy if not morally innocent philosophical naivete; or, somewhat worse, you are wittingly engaging in a deliberate and ultimately nihilism driven, deceit.

    You had challenged me earlier to explain some derisive questions I had directed at, and comparisons made to, you.

    Here is the explanation: One need not believe in a storybook devil in order to grasp certain obvious conceptual parallels which one encounters when dealing with the message put out by certain kinds of people.

    Rorty at least, was brazen enough to say outright that we should find mere pointless chance a worthy master. And, that he wanted what he wanted just because he wanted it, and would try to use the practices of classical liberalism against itself in order to more tightly evolve the social world in the community minded direction he wanted.

    You more or less admit you share Rorty's end. But nonetheless seem fixated on erecting a pantomime god in order to better peddle the notion of human life you want to unsympathetic ears.

    Does this help?

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  43. By the way, despite years of practice in "defensive writing" in order to avoid deliberate diversionary misconstruals ...

    I assume that in the context given, I do not have to insert "cosmic" or "such" or some similarly functional redundancy before the second use of "purposes"?

    " and insist on talking of evolutionary “purposes” when the crux of your position is to deny the objective reality of [ ] purposes,..."

    No, I thought not.

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  44. Another simple example of form following behavior in evolutionary biology: anthropologists say that our primate ancestors started using fire to cook meat BEFORE their brains had a dramatic increase in size.

    Adopting the behavior of using fire to soften meat took evolutionary pressure off the large muscles of the primate jaw (which are attached to the top of the skull cap). When jaw muscles are large, as in chimps, it puts constriction on the skull cap, making it far more difficult for the evolution of a larger brain.

    Today humans have weak jaws, but big brains, in part because our ancestors took up the behavior of softening meat with fire. Once the jaw muscles receded in size, the brain case could more easily grow larger--and did. The behavior of fire use led the evolution of the human form of the head.

    But if our primate ancestors could have talked, imagine a natural law Thomist primate arguing against the use of fire with the first Promethean primate:

    "Your behavior needs to FOLLOW your form. You were given giant jaw muscles for a reason: tearing raw meat. I know you like the taste of the cooked meat, but you're letting the highest use of your jaw's form go unrealized for a dubious end--the mere pleasure of cooked meat."

    "But I like cooked meat, and I'm lazy. I don't want to use my jaw muscles so vigorously. And cooked meat smells good."

    "If you follow your intellect instead of your passions and appetites, you can see that God gave you the sort of jaw you have for tearing raw meat. Your fire trick is imaginative, but applying its use to meat is contrary to your form--and therefore irrational."

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  45. "First you get a squirrel who isn't afraid of leaping from trees--and a benefit accumulates from the doing of it--or not."

    And the result is an emphatic, 100% "not" unless, in the zeroth step, you had a squirrel whose "form" already allowed it to leap from trees without dying—for example, whose limbs were already able, by "form" and nature, to serve at least to a degree as wings. Otherwise, being unafraid to leap from trees would be as counterproductive from an evolutionary standpoint as…well, as being ready, willing, and eager to ejaculate into a wombless rectum.

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  46. So far I've been resisting the urge to feed the troll, as it were, and intend to carry on.
    But because I believe it will at least allow me to do so more easily, I'd like to note a fact (probably obvious to everybody following; obviously, DNW brought our attention to related problems) that anyone who had participated in the remarkably similar discussion last autumn had to encounter the very same 'evolutionary utilitarianism' modified by Santi-dependent ethical realism, that is, Santi's preferences dictated by his feelings.

    It's as if our interlocutor thought that there's a natural end and a duty incumbent on living things to forward evolution. The (future?) result of selection is declared to be an end intended by Evolution conceived as a being with definite knowledge of what is good for living things to pursue (quite similar to what, say, Jews and Christians say about divine law).

    An ecphonesis:
    How can facilitating evolution be said to be an end of immanent action, a natural good, I know not.
    Nor do I know why would anyone evolution, which isn't even a thing (and obviously not 'a Thing' that sustains and guides us toward the good).

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  47. That should be:
    "why would anyone deify evolution"

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  48. Georgy Mancz said...

    "why would anyone deify evolution"
    April 2, 2015 at 4:34 PM "


    Probably because:

    They feel they need to parallel Aristotle's method despite disliking where his analysis leads ...

    And this mimicry move because:

    Santi recognizes that Rorty's ironist's "needs to talk to people" and imagination "argument", which is found in "Contingency, irony, and solidarity" will not resonate with anyone not already presumptively socialized (all the way down) to accept it.

    And that is because:

    Rorty admits that his ironist preference is a pure contingency. The natural reaction of Rorty's so-called "metaphysician" antagonist therefore, is likely a contemptuous shrug at the Ironist's personal preference, and the ironist's need to keep talking to other people in order to "keep himself together" (p.186).

    And therefore:

    Quoting Rorty will obviously not get "metaphysicians" to purchase a ticket to Rorty-land, as this passage from Contingency, irony, and solidarity" demonstrates:

    "I have been urging in this book that we try not to want something which stands beyond history and institutions. The fundamental premise of the book is that a belief can still regulate action, can still be thought worth dying for, among people who are quite aware that this belief is caused by nothing deeper than contingent historical circumstance. My picture of a liberal utopia in Chapter 3 was a sketch of a society in which the charge of 'relativism' has lost its force, one in which the notion of 'something which stands behind history' has become unintelligible, but in which a sense of human solidarity remains intact. In Chapter 4 my sketch of the liberal ironist was of someone for whom this sense ["solidarity" DNW] was a matter of imaginative identification with the details of others' lives, rather than a recognition of something antecedently shared."

    Rorty goes on to say, and I believe I am representing the sense fairly despite the extensive ellisions:

    "When the values of such institutions [liberal preferred solidarity institutions] is challenged ... no direct answer can be given, because there is no neutral ground. The best one can do with the sort of challenges offered by Nietzche or Heidegger is ...[to] ... ask these men to privatize their projects, their attempts at sublimity ... subordinating sublimity to the desire to avoid cruelty and pain. ... In my view, there is nothing to back up such a request, nor need there be. There is no neutral, noncircular way to defend the liberal's claim ..." [regarding the cruelty of a disinterest in the details of the lives and satisfactions of others; i.e., a state of nonsolidarity]



    1. So why will not Santi answer the question regarding his "we" premise and its supposed entailments?

    Because, as we (those of us who've read Rorty) knew all along, he cannot.

    2. And why is Santi then aping an Aristotle he officially rejects by deifying evolution?

    Because, "1".


    And I think that that just about wraps it up.

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  49. Scott,

    Notice what you said: "you had a squirrel..." with such-and-such powers belonging to its form already.

    You did not say that the species of squirrels generally had this combination of survival traits, but only this squirrel.

    So the squirrel has her hidden potencies only discovered by experiment (jumping out of a tree), not by proscription ("things of your type shouldn't be jumping out of trees").

    This single, contingent, TRANSITIONAL squirrel discovered this power in herself. Exposed to a contingent environmental challenge, she met it.

    Perhaps the majority of squirrels trying this experiment would have died or suffered sufficient shock or injury to never do it again. It wouldn't have been among their "potencies" to thrive after engaging in this behavior.

    Their gamble would have failed.

    But not this squirrel. This squirrel had a unique gambit of inclinations, appetites, traits, powers, preferences, potencies.

    So even on the idea of "real essences," there's no Golden Mean of Squirrel to conform to for this squirrel--this transitional squirrel.

    This squirrel says to her fellow squirrels: "Don't generalize. Don't try this at home. You might have variations that make tree leaping far more likely to be deadly for you than if I do it."

    Among variations in form supporting this squirrel's behavioral experiment might have been weight lighter than the species average, a tail wider than average, etc.

    And the tops of trees are akin to an island niche. Go boldly where none of your species has gone before, be fearless of heights, and maybe you'll pioneer a new species.

    But you can't win if you don't play. No proscription, only experiment. On the continuum of conformist to risky bets, form is conserved or form is put under pressure to support new behavior.

    But the cue is not taken from form. Form is tested by novel behavior.

    Every living thing is a contingent, irreducible variant placing a bet--conservative or daring--into a contingent, irreducible environment in the now. If the new behavior pays off, form in future generations will come under selective pressure to adapt; to change; to follow the new behavior.

    So the sequence is this: (1) not proscription, but experiment; (2) some degree of success or failure; (3) if failure, existing form and its potencies are conserved, but if successful, form comes under selective pressure to render more efficient and effective the newly adopted behavior.

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  50. Notice what Santi did not say: he did not say No, this daring squirrel didn't have to have body parts with such-and-such a form already before leaping out of trees could prove to be a successful survival/propagation strategy, so form actually does follow behavior.

    On the contrary, he acknowledges that form comes first and just waxes what he thinks is eloquent about the squirrel's daring "experiment," apparently somehow imagining that natural law ethics would say that a squirrel with winglike bits still shouldn't jump out of trees. (Perhaps he's still confused about the difference between using an organ for something other than its primary function, on the one hand, and positively frustrating a natural faculty, on the other. But at any rate he's clearly not—here, anyway—suggesting that the initial appearance of winglike bits is some sort of evolutionary response to sciurine experimentation.)

    So I'll take it that my main point has been conceded and his understanding of evolution is just as fundamentally wrong on the matter of variation as several of us have said it is. It's about time; several of us made it a bloody long time ago.

    I see comment moderation has been enabled on this thread, so as per my usual policy, this will be my last comment here.

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  51. Scott's not defending much now. He's got natural law whittled down to little more than prohibition against "positively frustrating a natural faculty"--a dubious idea that drops the context of the organism as a whole, and doesn't address the balancing of competing goods.

    For example, if you use the penis only for reproduction, then you "positively frustrate" a different natural faculty's activity--the brain's exercise of imagination.

    And a woman who regulates her fertility with contraception so as not to frustrate her graduate school education--the brain's desire for knowledge--is making a decision about competing goods that cannot be proscribed in advance.

    The environmental context of the organism is also important. Rural agricultural life (such as that lived by an Amish hausfrau) and city life (such as that lived by a single woman in NYC) entails a different weighting of competing goods (how much time devoted to education, how much to child-bearing, etc.).

    The nostalgia here is that natural law can provide substantial (non-trivial) guidance to both the rural and city woman by reading off the function of their sex organs in decontextualized isolation.

    Aquinas' notions about women and sex belong to a pre-Darwinian agricultural era when females were married off as girls of fifteen, and when advanced education and the holding off of marriage for young women was unthinkable.

    Life expectancy, after all, was under forty. It was a different world.

    Now it's eighty. And demographers tell us that 90% of all human beings on the planet will live in cities by the end of the 21st century. The concrete jungle does not support the sexual mores being advocated by contemporary natural law Thomists, and where they're seriously tried there it leads to ludicrous ordeals for married women (such as attempting to regulate fertility by the rhythm method).

    If you want to talk about frustration, think of the time consuming monitoring, mental distraction, and aggravation of married women practicing the rhythm method--which largely doesn't work anyway.

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  52. Scott said...

    Notice what Santi did not say: he did not say No, this daring squirrel didn't have to have body parts with such-and-such a form already before leaping out of trees could prove to be a successful survival/propagation strategy, so form actually does follow behavior.

    On the contrary, he acknowledges that form comes first and just waxes what he thinks is eloquent about the squirrel's daring "experiment," apparently somehow imagining that natural law ethics would say that a squirrel with winglike bits still shouldn't jump out of trees. (Perhaps he's still confused about the difference between using an organ for something other than its primary function, on the one hand, and positively frustrating a natural faculty, on the other. But at any rate he's clearly not—here, anyway—suggesting that the initial appearance of winglike bits is some sort of evolutionary response to sciurine experimentation.)

    So I'll take it that my main point has been conceded and his understanding of evolution is just as fundamentally wrong on the matter of variation as several of us have said it is. It's about time; several of us made it a bloody long time ago.

    I see comment moderation has been enabled on this thread, so as per my usual policy, this will be my last comment here.

    April 3, 2015 at 5:57 PM"


    What I notice is that when one heedlessly daring or mentally deranged squirrel falls from a limb no other squirrels are compelled by the Squirrel State, to spend billions of their tax dollars on a vaccine largely meant to enable the continued folly of the deranged ones, rather than curing them of it.

    And this perhaps shows Santi's deficiency in understanding when it come's to what the term natural law means as applied to rational beings and political animals.

    But of course, our readings of Rorty inform us that seeking the fellowship mandating essence of others in, say, their faculty of, and the application of, reason, is verboten as well.

    No, reason is ruled out of court in this solidarity search, as are all other found features or attributes.

    We are told that it's to be found only in our projective imagination and our abhorrence of "cruelty".

    Well now. How do we know to whom to apply our projections of fellowship and solidarity? How do we know that the victim of "cruelty" is really a victim real cruelty and just doesn't care to bother to wipe her own ass, or to do his own push ups in the morning?

    We don't, according to Rorty. We just extend the circle of solidarity and concern according to our "liberal" principles ... which means whims.

    And, after all our fellow academics, and all of the beings covered by our pet causes are encircled with love and compassion, then eventually, admits Rorty in a magnificent bit of knowing Ironist irony, the Ironist might even get around to extending that circle to encompass the people who actually make the things he uses, and who ultimately pay the bills he racks up.

    So imagine this then: that you are legally shackled in the name of someone else's sense of solidarity to an unreasoning being whose idea of experiencing cruelty is your indifference to his posing as a female and to his demand that you valorize this worthless behavior alongside the well-being of your own family and your own life-projects. And then you will have some idea of what it means to wind up in Santi-land.

    And we are about half way there right now.

    And like Scott, this will be my last on this thread on Santi's gambit.

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  53. This talk is now on youtube. Can you provide the handout mentioned at the beginning?

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