Coalition of the giving

I found this article by way Arts and Living Daily. It is an interesting--and darkly funny--take on the Arab/Muslim response to the tsunami: from the paltry amounts donated to paranoid ponderings about a US/Israeli conspiracy to destroy the Muslim world.

Natural Law Lecture Six

Aristotle’s Clarification of “Nature”

Ahh! The teacher of teachers. The great Aristotle. In this lecture, Koterski turns to Aristotle and his ideas that have influenced natural law. The focus in this lecture is first on Aristotle’s four causes, his theory of change, and our reasoning abilities.

Aristotle’s four causes are the material, the formal, the efficient (or agent), and the final cause. Each of these causes is a necessary part, on Aristotle’s view, of explaining how things come to be and how they act. This is relevant for natural law theory because Aristotle argues that the final cause—the ultimate purpose/goal/end of an entity is within the entity itself. Each being has a final cause to which all its actions and activities are ultimately directed. But this end is not imposed from with out or made up, it is a natural part of the entity.

This theory of the four causes also helps to make sense of change. Aristotle doesn’t want to deny Heraclitus’ idea that the world is dynamic and constantly changing, but he also recognizes that Parmenides was on to something in thinking that something has to stay the same for there to be identity. On Aristotle’s view, change is a real phenomenon, but it is something that happens to a particular thing that doesn’t change. When an animal grows, it changes—but the “it” essentially stays the same. Change is process where something stays the same and something is different. The final end remains the same for a particular being, but it has to change to move and develop towards that end.

Lastly, Koterski gets into Aristotle’s ideas on language and reasoning. Language, on Aristotle’s view, is the manifestation of rationality. It is the way in which one can come to grasp abstractions, make judgments, and form chains of reasoning. This, too, is helpful for natural law theory because it points to a natural feature of humans—our ability to speak. This ability shows even further our deeply rational nature.

Also, Aristotle’s work shows that one can reason from observation and experience to discover the real nature of things. It shows that we gain knowledge through observation and reflection but are not trapped at this level and can move into a deeper and more thorough understanding of the world and our own nature.

Natural Law Lecture Five

Greek Ideas of Nature and Justice

As I love ancient Greek philosophy and the pre-Socratics, I enjoyed this lecture. Koterski goes back to these thinkers looking for the sources of the ideas and principles that would come to form natural law. I don’t think he is claiming that the pre-Socratics or Plato are actually natural law thinkers, but he wants to look into their thinking for the precursors and beginnings of the ideas.

He starts where Western philosophy always starts: with Thales and the Milesian physicists—those fascinating thinkers with unpronounceable names who first struck out to try and explain the world in terms of physical or natural elements instead of myth and gods. This is a natural place for natural law to look for its roots because these thinkers, by looking to nature to explain nature open the door to explaining morality and society by way of nature as well.

Next, Koterski turns to the Sophists. Largely a contrast to natural law, these thinkers represent more of a positive law approach to ethics and social organization. They viewed human life as largely a human creation and human nature is not emphasized.

Lastly, Koterski looks to Socrates and Plato. Koterski gets close to saying that Plato, particularly in The Republic, is a natural law thinker. He doesn’t, but does insist that Plato is making an early attempt at a kind of natural law. Instead of looking at the obligations and requirements of ethics and society as human creations, Plato looks to human nature and its structures and abilities to find out what obligations and requirements we have and what this nature requires by way of conduct and social institutions.

I do get the sense that Koterski is reading natural law, at least a little bit, into these thinkers. At the same time, the roots and precursors are there and so it is worth starting here when looking at the history of natural law.

A World Without Israel

Here is an interesting article from Foreign Policy that imagines what the world might be like with no Israel. In a world without Israel, Josef Joffe asks, "Would the economic malaise and political repression that drive angry young men to become suicide bombers vanish? Would the Palestinians have an independent state? Would the United States, freed of its burdensome ally, suddenly find itself beloved throughout the Muslim world?" The answers are an emphatic no.

Natural Law Lecture Four

Principles of Natural Law Theory

This lecture largely focuses on the nature of personhood and its relation to natural law theory. Koterski explains that the concept of person is essential in all varieties of natural law theory. Natural law depends on there being a natural kind, in particular, a natural kind of humans. Because of rationality, humans are different, different in kind, than other animals—thus the well-known definition of man as the rational animal. We share with animals an animal nature: we have physical bodies that require nutrition, can grow and decline, can reproduce, and are able to take action. Importantly, like all animals, we have a pattern of development towards a mature individual. But humans also have rationality, which animals lack, and so require a different category.

Koterski more explicitly raises the issue of what might be called the marginal cases. Are non-paradigmatic humans (infants, senile, etc.) fundamentally different than the paradigmatic humans (what Koterski calls the normal case)? Koterski argues that natural law theory considers both to be, from a moral point of view, the same. And it is here that a new concept is needed: personhood.

Person is moral category that will demarcate who deserves protection due to its intrinsic dignity and rights. All humans, on Koterski’s view, are persons in virtue of their humanness. But, he argues, person is a wider category than human. For the religiously minded, God and angels are also considered persons. For the non-religious, one might consider forms of extraterrestrial life that meet certain standards to be persons (it seems quite plausible for there to be a rational Martian which would be a person but not a human).

Koterski argues that we should define human personhood structural—based on our biological structures—and not functionally. The functional definition would seem to leave out the marginal humans because they are incapable of performing the functions that typify humanity. This, he argues, would be arbitrary and subjective because (1) these functions can change and in some ways culturally and individually dependent and (2) because we have no clear way to demarcate the point where the human functionality comes into being. But moreover, even if we could, Koterski argues, nothing fundamental or essential has changed about the individual. The DNA and fundamental organizational principle of the being hasn’t changed, it is just being expressed more and more as the individual grows.

I should note here that I don’t think this is persuasive. Yes, the DNA is the same and the individual is a form of human life. But, there is something importantly different—the particular expression of the DNA and subsequent development has created new structures and with them new facilities and abilities that were not there prior. While I am not saying we must adapt a functional definition, Koterski and other natural law theorists are too quick, I think, to argue that there is no fundamental difference here.

Koterski develops the concept of person by tracing its historical roots back to Boethius—the 6^th century Roman philosopher. Boethius defined person as “an individual substance of rational nature.” Adapting the term person from the theatrical notion of persona—the role or character played, Boethius wanted a term to convey accountability and responsibility based on the rationality of the agent.

Koterski closes out the lecture with a discussion of the social dimensions of human nature. Human nature, he notes, requires various kinds of social relationships and interactions. The forms of these interactions and relationships are dependent on a number of different factors including: history, culture, political regimes, and individual choices, but reflection on human nature indicates that some kind of social relations are essential for our proper development and flourishing.

Natural Law Lecture Three

Law, Nature, Natural Law

This lecture starts with a lengthy discussion of definitions and the different ways of formulating definitions. He mainly focuses on definition as genus and species identification. He also discusses definitions that are focused on the part to whole relationship, on a thing’s structure, or on a thing’s function or use.

The rest of the lecture is divided between looking at Aquinas’ definition of law and then exploring the concept of nature. Aquinas defines law as “as an ordering of reason, promulgated by the person in charge of a community, for the common good.” Koterski explains each aspect of this definition: that law is an ordering of reason as opposed to an ordering based on will or power and that law has to be publicly disclosed and so on. Four different types of law, as articulated by Aquinas, are then explained: Eternal Law, Divine Law, Natural Law, and Human/Positive Law.

In his discussion of the definition of nature, Koterski follows Aristotle in claiming that we can discover an entity’s nature by observation and reflection. A things nature is the “internal principle of something’s development and typical activities.” It is the way something characteristically develops and acts.

In an interesting discussion of what is meant by natural, Koterski notes that the natural isn’t just average or the normal. It is what constitutes the full mature healthy individual member of that species. He discusses the “privilege of the normal case” as the case we use to describe the typical and characteristics traits and behaviors and to contrast this species with another. He also importantly argues that the normal case is not used for species demarcation, that is, for determining species membership. The normal case is used for comparing the natures of species, but it is not the sorting principle. In this way, he hopes to avoid the pitfalls of claiming that fetuses, senial, comatose, etc., are not humans because they are incapable of being rational.

Koterski closes the lecture with a brief discussion of human nature. Following Aristotle, he defines human as the rational animal. We belong to the larger group of animate objects, but what makes us specifically different is our broad power of rationality. He also discusses personality in addition to rationality, something I hope and expect he will explain more in subsequent lectures since what he meant by this was not clear. He didn’t mean personality in terms of “she has a nice personality.” I think he intends this to mean that humans have other important qualities and facilities besides rationality—and that these qualities are part of our personhood.

Natural Law Lecture Two

The General Nature of Ethics

This was an overview lecture which explained a little more about the breakdown and organization of the course. Koterski explained that his intention will be to look at natural law theory from both a philosophical and historical perspective. The philosophical approach was dealt with some in the first lecture, and here he explains that the historical approach isn’t just to understand the sequence of events in the history of natural law. It is to understand some of the philosophical questions better, in particular, the issue of relativism. Is morality merely a cultural phenomenon? Koterski holds out the promise that by looking at the history of the various insights of natural law and how it developed might help shed some light on this question.

Koterski then quickly explains the essentials of the four major traditions of ethics. He covers Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics, Kant’s Deontology, Mill’s Utilitarianism, and Religious divine command. He covers these in a very simply and basic way, and briefly discusses how they compare and contrast with natural law ethics. My one criticism here is that explains Kant theory as a systematized theory of the golden rule—and that is not an accurate explanation of the categorical imperative.

The next section of the lecture focuses on how natural law can meet the ideals that were laid out in lecture one: objectivity, universality, and intelligibility. Objectivity, he argues, will come from the basing of ethics on our natures as human beings. By asking what kind of beings we are and what our typically activities are, we can find an objective basis for ethical principles. The universality of natural law will come from a similar source in that if all humans share a common nature, the moral principles will be universal across this common nature. Lastly, intelligibility can be found because, it is claimed, one with an open and reasonable mind should be able to discover and understand human nature.

Next are the objections to natural law (and indeed morality itself): relativism, subjectivism, and skepticism. He doesn’t try to answer these concerns here, promising that these will be answer as he argues for natural law.

Lastly, Koterski discusses moral knowledge and natural kinds. Moral knowledge he will argue, is possible, contra the skeptic. He argues that there are certain claims of moral knowledge that it is just implausible to claim we don’t know or that are reasonable to deny. Using murder as an example, he claims it is undeniable that the killing of innocent life is wrong. The rub, of course, is what one considers to be innocent.

A natural kind is a “group that can be objectivity distinguished from another group on the basis of some property.” To be a difference in kind, the trait or property “is present in some degree in every member of the group and is totally lacking in other instances.” Differences in degree are differences along some dimension that all members of the group share. He uses water and salt as an example. Water and salt are different in kind—they are two different natural kinds. They each have a natural structure that gives rise to certain properties that all members of one group have and the other totally lacks. But liquid water, ice, and water vapor are different in degree—they possess related properties based on an essentially similar structure.

He closes the lecture with the question of whether humans are a natural kind. He thinks we are and will argue that the property that makes us different, the one we have that no other creature has, is rationality in the form of intellect and will. He doesn’t think that the possibility that we might find non-human rational creatures shows there is no natural kind—he just thinks he will expand the group of rational creatures are that deserving of respect.

More on Palestinian "Moderate"

Apparently, Abu Mazen/Mahmoud Abbas is a Holocaust denier. In FrontPageMag.com article prior to Abbas' appointment as Prime Minister in 2003, Rafael Medoff cites a 1983 book penned by Abbas: The Other Side: The Secret Relations Between Nazism and the Leadership of the Zionist Movement. In this book Abbas apparently doubts that the Nazi's murdered 6 million Jews, disputes that gas chambers were used to murder Jews, and claims these were a product of a Zionist conspiracy.

The Return of DDT

Here's a surprising op-ed from the NY Times by Nicholas Kristof advocating bringing back DDT in Malaria torn countries. While recognizing that DDT hasn't been shown to be dangerous to humans, he does perpetuate the myth(if indeed it is a myth) that DDT caused the death of bird species. This is, after all, the NY Times.

And now the opposite view....

And the opposing view from the NY Times -- of course.

Abbas, "The Moderate"

Charles Krauthammer on why Mahmoud Abbas is not the Palestinian moderate that everyone has declared him to be and that he offers more of the same.

Proletarian Expropriation, or Rationalizing Theft

This is just plain bizarre. Proletarian expropriation is defined in the blog entry as a "form of civil disobedience intended to represent a form of protest against a disproportional raise of prices and despite stagnating or lowering personal income."

In other words, stealing.

Civil disobedience can be a powerful tool used to undermine and then repeal unjust laws. But these loons are going into stores and restaurants and not paying for the goods and services because they think the prices are too high. But, thankfully, they make sure to leave a generous tip to the waiter. After all, he's part of the Proletariat I guess.

The ridiculous thing about this is that thinkers take this crap seriously, as if there were a real issue here. The blog entry at TransAtlantic Monthly has several paragraphs considering the legal ramifications, likely court responses, and whether this stealing is okay if the folks redistribute to those in need.

I should note that the blog entry is from a Serbian and all the episodes of proletariat stealing that are mentioned take place in Italy. Those wacky Europeans still think communism is going to make a comeback I guess. Though, I could see this happening in San Francisco.

Natural Law Lecture One

Philosophical Approach

The first lecture of Natural Law and Human Nature was good. Koterski starts this series off in an unusual, but effective, way. He presents three cases to show the history and importance of the natural law tradition. The first case is Sophocles’s Antigone. I am not going to recount the story, but essentially Antigone defies her king’s direct order not to bury her brother properly. In her defense, she cites a higher law above the king. She appeals to Zeus and to justice as overriding Crion's order.

Next, Koterski discusses the Nuremberg trials. He argues persuasively that the justices leading the trials had to make a kind of natural law appeal in order to try the Nazis. In part because of jurisdiction problems—how can a German by tried under British law for a crime not even committed in Britian—and in part, because German law under the Nazi’s made the actions on trial explicitly legal, the justices had to appeal to a higher law that transcends any sovereign state.

Lastly, Koterski discusses civil rights and Martin Luther King. MLK (and other civil rights activists before and after him) appealed explicitly to the natural law tradition in his defense of civil disobedience.

Given the range of time, culture, custom, and beliefs of these three stories, Koterski is trying to show us that natural law has a long and storied tradition that goes beyond any particular culture or even religious belief.

Koterski ends the first lecture with an appeal to philosophy. He tells us that this lecture series will subject the concepts of law, nature, and human nature to serious philosophical scrutiny. He tells us further that he is guided in his analysis by three philosophical ideas: objectivity, universality, and intelligibility. Objectivity in that he will try and appeal to evidence and argument in ways that are compelling and not mere subjective opinion. Universality in that he is aiming at a justification that applies to every kind of human being. Intelligibility in that these concepts should be ones that readily understandable.

The next lecture looks to be an overview of traditional ethical theories.

Natural Law and Human Nature

In the spring semester, I am taking a seminar on positive law. It looks to be very interesing, in particular because there will only be about 7-8 students, all philosophy graduate students and a few law students. So the quality of discussion should be high.

As a way of preparation, I took out from the library The Teaching Company's "Natural Law and Human Nature" by Father Joseph Koterski. No doubt there will be some religious overtones to Koterski's lectures, but I listened to his Ethics of Aristotle course and that was very solid.

My over ambitious goal is to blog summaries of the lectures after I listen to them. Hopefully,
I won't stop at Lecture One.

Putting Humans First

I am about half way through Tibor Machan's Putting Humans First. I've wanted to read it since it came out, but since he will be coming to speak to the Arizona Objectivists on 1/15 I thought it time to read it.

No surprises so far. It's a straightforward, pleasurable read. I am not sure its very convincing to someone already convinced of animal rights. Surprisingly, the book, so far, doesn't spend all that much time (part of the first chapter) on showing the faulty reasoning of the other side. And going by the table of contents, it won't. It is actually much more positive. Machan goes through the reasoning behind human rights and thereby shows why such reasoning can't be reasonably applied to animals. The book might have been more persuasive (again I am not finished yet) had it spent more time going through the problems with the argument on the other side.

But as I am in total agreement with Machan on this issue (see my piece on animal rights), the book is a pleasure to read.

Yet Another Attempt

I am trying, yet again, to committ myself to blogging regularly. My plan is to blog something everyday--no matter how trivial or uninteresting it might be. Hopefully I will develop the habit in this way. One idea is to comment on stuff I am reading or listening to (as in the Teaching Company)

Harry Potter and Philosophy

It's out! Harry Potter and Philosophy is now available. I haven't yet seen it my local Borders yet, but the online bookstores Amazon and BN.com have it. And you can get it from the publisher: Open Court

Paul Hamm and the Gold

I am deeply frustrated by this whole debacle. I see it as really quite simply. Paul Hamm won the gold medal fair and square and all this talk about him giving back the gold is absurd. The FIG,the South Korean team, and the media should stop their haranging of this tremendous and heroic athlete.

I don't know about gymnastic judging or the specific rules, and so can only go by what I hear commentators say. But from what I understand, yes, the judges miscalculated the starting valuing of the South Korean's parallel bars. However, they also didn't take two mandatory deductions. The miscalculation would have added a 1/10 th to his score, but the deductions would have subtracted 2/10ths, leaving the South Korean with a score 1/10 lower. I am not sure, but given the closeness of the competition, this might have even dropped him from the bronze. So, the last person who should want a review of the tapes and re-scoring should be the South Korean!

Moreover, whose to say that even if the South Korean's score was adjusted up 1/10th in the parallel bars, he would have won the gold? He very well might have, but he might also have relaxed a bit too much thinking he had a good lead, and that could have caused him to do worse on the high bar. Or he might have tightened up or got more anxious realizing he was up for the gold, and this could have caused him to do worse on the high bar. Other competitors could have entered the high bar rotation with different expectations and competited differently, resulting in a different scores.

The point is that once play resumes, a call can't be changed. The call is one factor that determines later results and can't be changed without negating those results. This is why Football doesn't allow instant replay once play resumes. And why the Court of Arbitration rarely rules on field-of-play decisions. Going back and changing a call in the middle of game is not fair or right because we can't know the repercussions on the game or competition had that call been made differently on the field-of-play.

There was an appeal procedure available to the South Korean team during play. They should have checked the scoreboard before the next competitor and protested then. That's fair, and that's the place for it. The next day is just being a spoiled sport.

All this talk of showing good sportsmanship should be directed at the South Koreans, not Paul Hamm. He is a great sportsman, competiting hard and great when the chips are down. (Let's not forget how well the South Korean Young did under the stress of a booing crowd after the disputed Russian score on the high bar!)

Paul Hamm earned the gold and deserves the gold.

How Voters Vote

The New Yorker has an interesting article on how voters vote: The Unpolitical Animal.

Some of the theories about what motivates (if anything) individuals to vote for whom is quite scary. The most striking idea discussed is that only about 10% of the electorate actually have anything close to a coherent political philosophy. And about 20% hardly have what one could call political views and make their voting decisions on gut.

The article also discusses how many voters have little understanding of the views they do hold--that they don't see how some views like being in favor of lower taxes excludes other views like increased social services or that when the polling question is rephrased the answer given is often in contradiction with the previous answer.

Roger is right!

Hicks' Explaining Postmodernism

Here's a quick review I posted at Amazon.com for Stephen Hicks' Explaining Postmodernism

When speaking with a colleague about this book, he was surprised to find out that Postmodernism has such a storied history including the likes of Immanuel Kant and Bertrand Russell. And many readers also will be surprised to see the intellectual pedigree that Postmodernism boasts. Of course, Dr. Hicks isn't arguing that Kant or Russell were Postmodernists--but what he does in this quick and highly readable book is to show how Postmodernism evolved out of the ideas and historical trends of the last few hundred years in philosophy. Tracing the development of various ideas in epistemology and politics, Hicks finds the roots of Postmodernism in Kant, Rousseau, and other Counter-Enlightenment thinkers. The primary thesis of this book is that "the failure of epistemology made postmodernism possible, and the failure of socialism made postmodernism necessary." The history of modern epistemology has, by and large, failed at defending reason as one's means of knowing the world. The failure of socialism, both economically and morally, lead to, as Hicks calls it, a "crisis of faith" among many in the Left. In order to maintain their belief in the superiority of socialism over capitalism, many theorists used the failures of epistemology to eschew reason, reality, and truth. One now no longer has to deal with the evidence that shows the superiority of capitalism. Thus, we end up with the nihilistic, skeptical, and relativistic Postmodernism dominating much of academia and the political left.

Dr. Hicks is able to condense abstract and complicated ideas for a non-philosopher to understand without losing the essence of the ideas. He competently and clearly presents the ideas and positions without ever degenerating into ad hominem or resorting to polemics. As such, I highly recommend this wonderfully written and highly readable work to anyone--philosopher or not--with an interest in the history of ideas or an interest in understanding postmodernism.