DISQUS

What 'empathy' gives to jurisprudence is unlimited subjectivity. If as a jurist I am empathetic to Buddhism's life suffering or Marx's eternal class struggle or Hitler's quest for purification of the Aryan race, then my decisions will track my empathy, NOT the intent of the Framers. Justice Kennedy's citation of foreign laws for American decisions is a case of empathy at work.

If empathy is to be Mr. Obama's standard, then we'll get the feel-good, nice-nice, maximum good for the maximum number decisions we deserve. Note however, that "justice" becomes lost, not found, in the slop of empathy.

Is it the feminist view that "purity" of the female is one of the ideals that justifies natalist policies? Or, is it the feminist view that "purity" of the female is the ideal used to justify anti-natalist policies?

Mary Douglas settled the question on purity long ago, but then, how many ideologues, Left, Right, or feminist, read Mary Douglas?

There is something incredibly eerie about quantifying the decision to have children, and there is a similar eeriness about quantifying human happiness and meaning. Questions about meaning are many thousands of years old, and still, fortunately for the diversity of humanity and world literature, unresolved. As for happiness studies, if there is one thing certain from science during the past five hundred years it is that whatever quantification of happiness results from the current studies, it will be found to be utterly wrong five hundred years from now. If we've gotten physics wrong at least three times by the most brilliant minds on the planet, how much more likely will it be that we will get the quantification of happiness wrong?

This is not an argument to stop happiness studies (because they are illuminating, to say the least) , or to stop the multi-millennia ruminations about meaning. However, it is an argument that solutions to the human predicament or quantifying human happiness are part of the never-ending, wonderful conversation of philosophy, without permanent resolution. The study of humanity is not the study of sterile mathematics. Those of us who believe it is, are sometimes regarded as being, "eerie."

"If you come to feel that involved plans tend to be dashed and that resisting gratification leaves you with less than you could have had, you’ll learn not to form involved plans or defer desire. I think having consistently enough money is a major factor in developing the sense that long-term projects can be successfully carried through. But having enough is itself largely a function of being able to carry through long-term plans. Poverty can be so pernicious precisely because it carries with it the conditions for its own reinforcement."

This describes the play between the two major factors of the many factors that make up human psychology: fallibilism (the Pessimist's world-view) and improvability (the Optimist's world-view). For the fallibilist, pain and suffering place 'helplessness' as the ultimate moral value. To the improvabilist, pain and suffering are to ameliorated as the goal of improving, but not by making the emotional blackmail of 'helplessness.'

Hard work and defering immediate gratification are hallmarks of optimism; cooperation and immediate consumption are hallmarks of pessimism. Poverty is a self-perpetuating anchor to the pessimist's world-view; to the optimist, today's poverty is but a spur to greater sustained effort.

The two world-views are eternally opposed; either poverty crushes, or it emboldens.

Beautiful water; hope you two are having a wonderful time.

Some few centuries ago, there were 352 Greek cities on the Anatolian Peninsula; all are Turkish now with Turkish names, ever since the Muslim conquest of Constantinople. Interesting, for a philosopher, to think how different Turkey might be today if all of the Greek lights had not gone out in Anatolia. Do they read Homer in Turkey, for instance (you are quite near Troy), or are all things Greek (their ancient enemy, including Alexander) diparaged?

When Europe lost Greek thought in the 5C, eight hundred years of intellectual stagnation ensued. Do any Turks see a similar lesson for their culture, by the loss of Greek thought after the sack of Baghdad in the 13C?

Beautiful water; history everywhere. Hae a great time.

Will,

If having children were a rational calculation, the population curve for humanity would still be arithmetic instead of geometric after 1,000 CE, and Malthus would be a god today instead of being an idiot. No one is ever really ready to have children, and the 'benefits' of having children are wonderfully incalculable...for some.

Hold your sleeping child against your chest, nuzzle the sweetness of her hair, and toss out cost/benefit analysis to the unmoved and unmovable among us. The child makes an adult as much as the adults create the child: it is a mutual transformation, all for the better.

Some call it, 'biology.' Others call it, 'humanity.'
A few might call it, 'maturity.' But the very best word to describe it, is "happiness."

'Be free,' Will.

Good grief, Will, cost/benefit analysis of having children? Preceeded by, cost/benefit of getting married? Preceeded by, cost/benefit of... What will be the psychology of the child who resulted from a cost/benefit analysis, or what will be the character of any marriage after a required cost/benefit, or...?

Sometimes, a cold shudder is known as, 'the willies.'

So, national income is to be measured as a consequence of where you are from, not where you live, work, and earn an income? Wouldn't such a methodology make Jewish people to be the world's richest 'natural,' perhaps followed by the Chinese, and make the Hutu the poorest 'natural'?

Is a Zimbabwean in London from Zimbabwe, or is he a 'natural' from Shona? And what of mass migrations fleeing civil wars or genocide? How does the 'natural' better measure income than GDP after abrupt mass migrations? Every line on every map of the Middle East was drawn in Whitehall or Paris a century ago. What's 'natural' about being from Libya, Iraq, Jordan, etc, when the past thousand years has been tribalism?

How is the 'natural' methodology not merely a Trojan Horse, seeking future tax revenue from outside a national economy? Isn't this similar to liberal legislatures in the U.S. attempting to tax the daily earnings of travelling MLB or NFL ballclubs?

Paradigm shift? Not in identity formation, but perhaps in tax collection.

What is at stake for Mr. Obama's presidential campaign is the sharp contrast between his 'unity' rhetoric and his close, twenty-year association with 'separatist' preaching. He has repudiated the remarks in the sermons, but embraces the preacher who made them. Loyalty is a wonderful character trait, so long as the loyalty is not blind to truly toxic ideas.

Mr. Obama's campaign is suddenly in very serious trouble, and as the presumptive Democratic nominee, he has not demonstrated with his speech that he understands the fundamental problem: He is not going to get a pass on this election because of race, and whatever positive force his race was in the election is utterly lost if his 'unity' message is confused by the rants of a religious friend grounded in racial hatred. Much as Mr. Spitzer's contrast of a moralizing sex client undid him, it is the contrast between a racial 'unity' campaign and a 'separatist' hatred that will undue Mr. Obama.

Loyalty is wonderful; but the voters in November are going to feel VERY nervous about Mr. Obama's tolerance for extremists.

Beavioral economics, like political psychology and neurobiology, are the new sub-disciplines which will wrench us into a better self-understanding. Somewhere in their inquiry--likely in neurobiology by the end of this century--they will find the sources of both freewill and human happiness.

But then, under neoclassical economic theory, 'absolute divergence' likely sets in between the science cultures (the West) and the non-science societies, so that the rich get happier and richer and happier and...

Good interview. Very cutting edge topic, with huge implications.

'Virtue,' Montesquieu noted, is the "glue" that holds together republics, while 'honor' is the glue that holds together monarchies. Bowman's book noted that all of the Judaic/Christian cultures began a post-honor sociology as a consequence of WWI, which leaves us with only 'virtue' and a wistful nostalgia for 'honor' as the glues to hold republics together. "Honor,' by the way, is always an important 'glue' for the military, as in "Duty, Honor, Country" as the motto at West Point.

M noted one other glue, however: absent 'virtue' or 'honor,' FEAR can hold a society together: he called such fear societies, "tyrannies."

Perhaps the best way to understand Senator McCain is to think of the phrase, 'men of honor' whenever he mentions 'virtue.'

Fascism is not racist; Nazism is racist, virulently so. Mussolini only adopted racism very late and most reluctantly after Hitler's rants forced the issue. Jews never experienced in fascist Italy what Jews experienced in Nazi Germany.

As for 'parallels,' fascism is not an economic system. There is little economic theory in fascist literature ('Be on time, or else' pretty much describes all of fascism's economic theory). Fascism is not merely a difference in degree from the modern regulatory state; fascism is a wholesale difference in "philosophy of life" (Hitler's term), governance ('totalitarian' is Mussolini's word), and intent (deliberately murderous). Fascism is another "permanent revolution" (Trotsky's term) like Marxism, but without any of Marxism's significant economic theory.

With an economic theory underpinning its ideology, Marxism 'normalized' as it captured control over a government. Fascism and Nazism never normalized; they had to be killed in order to defeat them.

The word 'fascist'--as in "quasi-fascist"--is getting an awful lot of use lately, from both the Right and the Left and now, libertarians. Accusing someone of fascist tendencies is becoming the new form of PC: intimidate an alternative opinion into silence by blackmailing it emotionally.

There are well in excess of 24,000 scholarly volumes written on fascism, and even reading only a few of the best scholarship posits that fascism is BOTH anti-conservative and anti-liberal. Fascism might well be right-wing socialism, but it is decidedly anti-conservative as much as it is anti-liberal.

Like the tale of the boy who cried "wolf," the more we carelessly bandy the term 'fascist' around, the less impact it will have when an actual fascism captures a democratic government (one of Paxton's defined pre-requisites for a movement to be accurately described as being "fascist").

Liberals and neo-cons are not going to give up using the word to describe whom they fear; it would be nice, however, if we libertarians were better read and intellectually more accurate about our psychic fears.

Nice interview. Interesting premise to the book, which accounts for its quick notoriety in an election year. The book is already sold out locally, and put on back-order until the publisher prints more. Congratulations to JG.

One can already see this book generating "Hillhitler" as a pejorative term to match "Bushitler" of the past few years, should Mrs. Clinton win the presidency. If she skillfully anticipates the potential linkage during the campaign, she could easily throw off any personal association of her views with fascism by either a visit to the Holocaust Museum, or by taking on the theofascist mullahs of Iran.

One very prominent part of fascism is its religiosity, and I do not remember any part of the interview discussing fascism's deep roots in salvific theological doctrines.

May I expand?

There is an enormous difference between 'shunning' and 'losing.' Those shunned are being subjected to a psychological form of emotional blackmail, almost always justified as an expression of an opposing morality (see Tevyah's shunning of his youngest daughter). The goal of shunning is punishment, in order to compel behavior acceptable to the author of the shunning.

But a beautiful woman who rejects a "sexist male" is not shunning, and he has lost no freedom by her CHOICE of mates. There is always a loser in a choice, by the very nature of making a choice. Note that freedom adheres to the person making the choice, not to the rejected--the losing--choice. There is certainly no loss of freedom in choice (choice grounds freedom!), and there is no loss of freedom in shunning.

There's disappontment in losing...but grownups are supposed to know how to get over it.

Shunning is not the expression of moral values; shunning is the expression of the desire to punish, to seek revenge, to acquire some method of extracting a sense of 'justice' where formal justice systems refuse to be involved. In short, 'shunning,' while voluntary, is not anabolic and is not to be confused with the moral of freedom which very definitely is anabolic. The beautiful avoiding the ugly is not shunning; it's vanity.

Similarly, those shunned have not acquired a diminished freedom. The shunned are free to attempt to lift the shunning, and to give up if the effort is fruitless. But, no one has lost freedom by the shunning.

Perhaps the confusion has to do with a relativist's world-view. To the relativist, toleration is awarded to all views, by merit of none being better than any other. However, there are clearly times when a view is intolerable, negating the indecisive (suicidal) stand of the relativist. Throw 'inclusion' and 'exclusion' into this mix of what is tolerable or intolerable, and one can wrap themselves up in the false conundrum of 'shunning' as a moral value.

Freedom is inclusion, but not absolute. In fact, it is the opposition to both relativism (suicidal at its extreme) and absolutism (homicidal at its extreme)that distinguishes freedom as a philosophy, not as an ideology (see Willaim James, and Nietzsche).

I have driven a Harley for years, and the numbers of women who are complete strangers and have asked for the first ride of their life is simply incredible. If we think that a woman on the back of a bike is sexist, then we don't understand the sensuality of women. A woman on the back is not sexist; it's sexy! Just ask them!

From outside the Western experience, the 'liberal morality' is appallingly immoral. In more than a few places around the globe, Westerners are fighting to the death non-Westerners who are fighting to the death any adoption of 'liberal morality,' and both sides make the argument that their fight is 'moral.'
Hitler's argument was made in moral terms, as was Marx's; both are moralizers born out of the Western tradition of 'liberal morality,' albeit gone bezerk. But then, Madonna's tongue down Britney's throat is widely perceived as the exact metaphor for people to use to reject 'liberal morality.'

Mr. Wilkinson is correct, though, that it is economics which is going to be decisive in the morality/ideology/theology wars. But what drives worldwide exponential growth in economic prosperity over the past five hundred years has very little to do with morality. The 'liberal morality' is not the engine up front, leading humanity and prosperity; it's the caboose, vaingloriously taking credit. And most definitely, the engine leading humanity is not found in any theology.

I'm surprised that Dr. Pinker is not further along in his moral inquiry. He writes brilliantly about human identity formation, so one would think he'd make the connection that Watson pointed out will dominate the 21C: the meld of psychology with biology.

In that interdisciplinary meld in the century ahead, we'll learn that the origin of all moral systems, all theologies, all social codes, all ideologies and all political theories over the past five thousand years is biological, not philosophical. When that happens, both moral absolutism (homicidal at its extremes) and moral relativism (suicidal at its extremes) will become treatable pharmacologically (because Watson & Crick proved that all of biology obeys the laws of chemistry).

In short, no more thugs. Not because of 'liberal morality,' but because they are on a drug regimen for what ails them. Throw into the 21C biology/psychology meld the nascent subdisciplines of evolutionary psychology and political psychology, and I should think Dr. Pinker might like to re-think his views about morality. He sounds dated already.

Politics is always a matter of pragmatics, and unfortunately we libertarians are notorious for our lack of pragmatism. As a 'fringe' movement, we bask in the glow of ideological purity to principle, even when such 'principles' will lead to the sudden unemployment of millions of Americans (the certain effect of defaltionary policies by switching to a hard currency), or repulse an electorate which perceives open drug use as nihilistic self-destruction.

Liberty is not license, as Locke pointed out, and we libertarians too often express political positions that are perceived as being licentious, even hedonistic. Worse, the libertarian is marked by a fear and subsequent hatred of government, just as the socialist is marked by a fear and subsequent hatred of humanity. Both ideological positions are known for their hates, and how does one build an anabolic movement based upon core hate? The American public is NOT going to support any political movement based upon hatred for the alternative point of view, which is actually the core principle of libertarianism.

Thus, we libertarians shelter, in the name of 'principle,' the very elements that assure us of never being more than a 'fringe': we are known for our ideological purity (itself a deadly phenomenon), and our hatred for those who disagree with our thinking. Dr. Paul personifies the unpragmatic, ideological puritan.

Freedom is not about 'purity,' and never will be. Freedom is never a monism or about the epistemology of One; freedom is about pluralism and the epistemology of Two. Again and again, the libertarian movement demonstrates its internal contradictions to the American public, and the public is understandably turned off.

Which is how it should be. That a freedom-loving people should be repelled by a freedom-espousing movement makes sense if one understands that the public finds ideological extremism and hedonism to be frightening. There is a solid 10-20% of the American electorate who are freedomists, and such a base can decisively influence which policies are implemented or what legislation gets adopted. But the libertarian movement is so rigid, so proud of its impracticality, and so misunderstanding of its own contradictions that it dooms itself to te 4-5% 'fringe' of electoral politics.

Racism in libertarianism is illustrative of the self-contradiction condemning the movement to the fringe. How any libertarian can perceive the MLK civil rights movement as anything other than freedom-seeking is rigid thinking (bias) at its worst. Dr. Paul's candidacy is, net-net, a terrible setback to freedom as a political agenda.

If political candidates had freedom as a philosophy instead of as an ideology, the American public would vote for such thinking with great enthusiasm. But the libertarian movement constantly demonstrates that it has freedom as an ideology, not as a philosophy--as license, instead of as liberty--and the voting public responds accordingly.

'Be free.'

We libertarians continue to argue immigration as if it were merely an issue of free economics. But every Paris riot, every genocide, all revolutions--even mass migrations--are grounded in the psychology of human identity formation, not just economic decisions. Immigration is a far more complex issue than economics, or free markets. Osama bin Laden is a second generation immigrant, to point out an extreme example: highly educated, independently wealthy, enjoys organization. An ideal immigrant...but what makes up his personal identity, other than self-loathing?

The American people are not going to support porous borders, cosmopolitan liberalism or not, so long as the social sciences are not an integral part of the solution, as well as free economics.

Isn't Ms. Howley your significant other?