Religion and Philosophy

Two Women Who Never Read Kant

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

German philosopher Immanuel Kant ( 1724 – 1804) was the all-time champ at rules-based ethics, concocting several useful formulations of what he called “the categorical imperative,”or the principle of absolute morality. All of them are, as absolutes, the starting points for hopelessly convoluted debates and “what ifs?,” but philosophy geeks love that stuff. For me, the main value of Kant’s absolutism as that they are useful for pinging ethics alarms.

Kant’s “Formula of Humanity” stated (in German, of course): “So act that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means,” or in the short version, “Never treat another human being as merely as means to an end.”

Abortion, for example, is an ethical controversy that Kant clarifies quickly: abortion rationalizers have long tried to duck the “Formula of Humanity” by denying that a fetus with human DNA created by humans that will grow to be a born and eventually a walking, talking, member of human society isn’t a human being at all, and thus killing it for the benefit of its mother isn’t using whatever it is as a means to an end.

You can get in the high weeds of Kant’s most famous rule here. For instance, Kant holds that it may be wrong for a person to treat himself or herself merely as a means: now there’s a metaphorical rabbit hole. But for the purposes of this post, let’s just look at two recent examples of people who probably can’t spell Kant, never mind recognize when they are defying him.

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My Answer To “Name Withheld’s” Question To “The Ethicist”: “Tell Sis To Shut The Hell Up!” Yours?

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

An inquirer to “The Ethicist,” Kwame Anthony Appiah, asked this week:

“A year ago, I was told I had a form of ovarian cancer and was given two to three years to live — five years, if I’m in the top quartile of patients. I nursed my husband through metastatic lung cancer for 15 months. It was horrific; I am hoping that God takes me early. My sister, whom I love very much, is part of a fundamentalist Christian church and is one of their top “prayer warriors.” As such, she calls me nearly every day and launches into long prayers asking God to send my cancer to the “foot of the cross.” She implores me to pray with her and says that if I just believe that God will cure me, he will.I grew up Catholic and have fallen away from the church. I believe God is bigger than what we can understand as human beings. I am a data-driven health care practitioner: I believe that everybody has to die of something, and this happens to be my fate. I’ve told her as tactfully as I can that her praying for me and expecting me to pray with her for my cure is upsetting to me. It makes me feel that if there is a God, he must really hate me; otherwise, he would have cured me. (She says that he wants to use me as a “messenger” to others and that it’s the Devil, not God, who gave this disease to me.)…

“What do I say to my sister without belittling her beliefs? I’ve told her that if she wants to pray for me, I would rather she do it on her own time and not ask me to participate. But she is persistent, thinking that she’s going to “save my soul” and my body at the same time. She disputes every reason that I give her and insists that what she is doing is helpful. But it’s not helpful; it sends me into a terrible depression.”

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Ethics Observations On A Bizarre Conservative Tweet Exchange [Name Confusion Corrected!]

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

Lizzie Marbach, a former Ohio GOP official and currently director of communications at Ohio Right to Life, tweeted ,

This upset Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio), who is Jewish,  so he tweeted, twice,

Ugh.

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Porsche’s Woke “Mistake”

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

How did censorship, airbrushing history and “it isn’t what it is” become hallmarks of progressivism? A discussion for another time…

For the nonce, consider Porsche, which airbrushed away the famous Portuguese statue of Jesus Christ that overlooks the capital of Lisbon in a promotional video celebrating 60 years of its iconic 911 model. For some reason, many people had a problem with that.

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Comment Of The Day: “MAGA Loyalists: Do You REALLY Believe That Anyone Who Makes A Public Threat Like This Can Be Trusted To Be President?…”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I am proud to present an epic Comment of he Day by A M Golden on the post, “MAGA Loyalists: Do You REALLY Believe That Anyone Who Makes A Public Threat Like This Can Be Trusted To Be President? Because He Can’t…Ever.” It is wise, wide-raanging and nuanced, so I’m not going to waste your time with an introduction. Just read, think, and enjoy.

***

As the saying goes, “When someone tells you who they really are, believe them.” We have enough evidence to see with our own eyes and ears who Trump is and who he is not and that should not be relevant to who Joe Biden is and who he is not.

This entry, the previous one in the latest installment of the “Nation of Assholes” series and the one before that about Rudy Giuliani’s untrustworthy secret recorder have all coalesced in my mind this weekend as I have spent several days wearing myself out over planning for a pop-culture convention next week by following other conventions in other cities on social media to determine how the shows are accommodating the guests’ requirements under SAG-AFTRA’s strike rules and what that means for how I should approach any celebrity guest I wish to meet.

I get tired of holding the hands of new convention-goers who don’t understand the rules, ask for clarification and end up not following my advice. I get tired of veteran convention-goers who think they have the right to get around the rules. For entitled people who cut lines, who try to sweet-talk the guest into extra perks and who make little to no effort to ask polite, intelligent questions. They make everything harder on everyone else. Celebrities won’t want to attend these things if people don’t understand or respect boundaries. I have too many stories to recount of fans acting like inconsiderate asses and those stories are from before the pandemic.

We are already an entitled enough culture that treats celebrities like commodities, as if buying a movie ticket or following a TV program requires that anyone who appeared in the same owes us unlimited time, an autograph, a selfie, a kidney… One of the best things about the strike is that it’s finally becoming somewhat public knowledge that most actors aren’t millionaires.

We treat others like us even worse. Not only do we not put most of our fellow citizens on pedestals, but we don’t even afford them the basic respect of treating them the way we would want to be treated. As long as there’s something in it for us, I guess…

Somehow, qualities of character, such as honesty, integrity, patience, kindness, self-control (sorry, I think I wandered into the Fruits of the Spirit from the Bible) seem to have been lost very quickly. We are a mess as a culture and there’s a lot of blame to go around, not least because we have forgotten the Golden Rule.

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When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: The Congresswoman’s Prayer Breakfast Joke

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

Outspoken freshman Congresswoman Nancy Mace, (R-SC), decided to throw away her prepared remarks and riff at the beginning of her speech at fellow South Carolinian Sen. Tim Scott’s prayer breakfast last week. That was her first mistake.

“When I woke up this morning at 7, I was getting picked up at 7:45, Patrick, my fiance, tried to pull me by my waist over this morning in bed. And I was like, ‘No, baby, we don’t got time for that this morning,'” Mace began. “I gotta get to the prayer breakfast, and I gotta be on time.”

Yes, there’s nothing better to warm up the crowd at a prayer breakfast like a pre-marital sex joke!

Seriously, how hard is it to avoid making comments about sex at a prayer breakfast? She probably embarrassed Sen. Scott thoroughly, who was metaphorically batting second behind the nookie narrative in her remarks as she praised him profusely. Scott is running for President, however futilely, and doesn’t need any silly but completely avoidable controversies. Mace also probably made Seacoast Church Pastor Greg Surratt a little uncomfortable, who had honored both her and Scott as a part of his congregation.

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“Curmie’s Conjectures” #3: Confucius and the Fourth Circuit

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

by Curmie

Twentysomething years ago, a few months after completing my PhD, I got a phone call from my mentor in Asian theatre, who, upon learning job search wasn’t going as well as I might have hoped, asked if I wanted to teach a couple sections of the university’s Eastern Civilizations course.  I asked if I was really qualified to teach such a course.  His response: “You know something, and you can read.” 

Based largely on his recommendation, I got an interview for the position.  I made no attempt to conceal my ignorance of a lot of what I’d be teaching.  But the department had struggled with grad students who had lost control of their classrooms, and I’d taught full-time for ten years before entering the doctoral program; I got the job.  The head of the Eastern Civ program closed the interview with “There are some books in my office you’ll want to read before you start.”  I knew something, and I could read.

That’s relevant to my consideration of the recent ruling of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Porter v. Board of Trustees of North Carolina State University, in which a tenured faculty member claimed to have been punished for arguing against certain initiatives undertaken by his department.  I’m no lawyer, so there’s some legalese I’m not so sure about, and I have no interest in chasing down all the precedents cited by either the majority or the dissent to see if they really say what these judges say they say.  But I know something and I can read. 

More to the point, one of the texts I taught in that Eastern Civ course was Confucius’s Analects, which I had to get to know a lot better than I did previously in order to teach it to someone else.  One of the central tenets of Confucian thought was his argument against having too many laws, as no one could possibly predict all the various special circumstances surrounding every dispute.  Context matters; timing matters; motives matter.  Confucius’s solution was to turn everything over to a wise counselor (like him) who would weigh all the relevant elements on a case by case basis.  That’s not the way our justice system works, nor would it be practical, but it’s easy to see its appeal… in theory, at least.

Significantly, Confucius’s reservations about laws’ inability to anticipate all the possible combinations of circumstances are the first cousin if not the sibling of what Jack calls the “ethics incompleteness principle” which asserts that there “are always anomalies on the periphery of every normative system, no matter how sound or well articulated.” 

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Ethics Quotes For The Fourth: On Liberty, Freedom, and Democracy [Part II]

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

US-original-Declaration-1776

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

—-The Declaration of Independence

“It is my living sentiment, and by the blessing of God it shall be my dying sentiment, independence now and independence forever. “

—-Daniel Webster, U.S. politician and orator

“Liberty is the soul’s right to breathe, and when it cannot take a long breath, laws are girdled too tight.”

—-Henry Ward Beecher, abolitionist.

“Without an unfettered press, without liberty of speech, all of the outward forms and structures of free institutions are a sham, a pretense – the sheerest mockery. If the press is not free; if speech is not independent and untrammeled; if the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear, it makes no difference under what form of government you live, you are a subject and not a citizen.”

—- Senator William Borah (R-ID), 1917

 “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

—-George Orwell
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Ethics Observations On The Left’s Unethical Three Freakout Day

/ Jack Marshall / 16 Comments

Yesterday’s clean and persuasive Supreme Court decision finally striking down racial discrimination in university admissions after decades of pretending it wasn’t the Consitutional offense it was was followed by two more sound Constitution-based decisions that were as important as they were necessary. All three were quickly attacked as “partisan” and “extreme” when they were neither, except to those who find the boundaries imposed by our nation’s traditional democratic principles overly obstructive to their schemes.

Finally ruling on a lawsuit brought by six state governments, the Supreme Court rejected President Biden’s insane $430 billion student loan forgiveness plan as illegal because it was never authorized by Congress. In a cynical, Harry Reid-ish strategem to buy the 2022 mid-term elections, Biden had announced a $430 billion gift to mostly middle-class and wealthy citizens who were unable or unwilling to do what millions of Americans in their exact situation had done: paying back money they owed for a benefit they had received. In many ways it was progressive irresponsible government at its worst. The Constitution gives Congress, not the the White House,the power to determine how federal funds are spent. As Illya Somin wrote yesterday, “If the administration had won, Biden and future presidents would have been empowered to use vague statutes to usurp Congress’ constitutional control over the federal budget. Moreover, because of the context for this case, it also would have allowed the president to abuse emergency powers for partisan ends.”

The “partisan” accusation was especially dishonest (Vox: “The Supreme Court’s lawless, completely partisan student loans decision, explained”) since that famous right-wing partisan Nancy Pelosi had endorsed the position of the SCOTUS majority just two years ago, saying, “People think that the President of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness. He does not. He can postpone. He can delay. But he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress.” Chief Justice Roberts included her statement in his opinion for the majority, but facts don’t matter. The increasingly unhinged progressive mob, aided and abetted by the mainstream media, pronounced the decision the product of an “extreme” conservative majority running amuck.

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Ethics Hero: Non-Weenie Chard Scharf

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Pronouns again.

A reader flagged this story and it almost got lost in the swirl of ethics chaos this month, so I want to get it up quickly today. Chad Scharf was the vice president of software engineering at the Jacksonville, Florida, location of Bitwarden, which is a cybersecurity firm based in California. I suspect that headquarters locale is at fault for the fact that Bitwarden decided that all employees should include “their “preferred pronouns” in their personal profiles on Slack, an online messaging platform. This was, of course, part of its diversity/equity/inclusion embrace.

DEI is a cover for government, corporate and other sinister educational efforts to engage in discrimination, progressive virtue signalling and indoctrination, and the only way to slow it down until the courts step in is to show some backbone and say, “No.” That’s what Scharf did. He declined to list any preferred pronouns, and that should have been the end of the issue. There is a clear and reasonable presumption that an employee with a male name who doesn’t specify pronouns is content with being identified by male pronouns.

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