The Proper Hermeneutics

I find myself in substantial agreement with Tom Kreitzberg at Disputations when he attributes a certain kind of theological sentiment to "the willingness of lay Catholics to study the writings of the Church", but I'm not so sure that I agree with his assessment of the source of the sentiment.

Citing a speech of Pope Benedict XVI to the Roman Curia in which two methods of "reading" the Second Vatican Council are limned, Tom notes that

as Catholics (particularly layfolk) became more adept at arguing from source documents, they became more dependent on source documents for their arguments, which gave rise (or at least vigor) to the whole "my source document is more authoritative than your source document" style of debate. With the Second Vatican Council, you suddenly get a whacking great load of highly authoritative source documents, a fact that in itself makes the 1960s a decade unlike most any other in the history of the Church.

I think, on the one hand, that it is true that one does, indeed, find arguments of this sort going on in certain circles. It has been my experience, however, that most of these circles are confined to the Internet--discussion lists, online forums (fora?), blogs, etc. The participants tend to be college educated folks with an intense interest in the Church. To a certain lesser extent you find some of this sort of activity in the MSM as well, though such venues seem to me to be on the wane in this particular regard.

On the other hand, I find few folks in the pews getting as deeply involved in these sorts of things as do the online participants, and in general the more distinct one's professional life is from academia the less likely is it that one will engage in the sort of polemics that Tom describes. Or at least that is what my own personal experience has been after two decades of living in and around academia in various cities east of the Mississippi.

This leads me to suggest that the problem lies not so much in the allegedly newfangled phenomenon of laymen reading Church documents (the historical record suggests that there have always been plenty of people doing that, though obviously if one searches through certain historical periods when literacy rates were different one can substantiate a variety of hypotheses; but I'm not aware of any other than anecdotal evidence that the proportion is now greater than ever before) but rather in an attitude that is endemic among academics, especially American and Western European ones (this particular phenomenon does not strike me as being much of an issue outside of those regions). The attitude is that of intellectual pride; I am tempted to characterize it as a particularly American one, but really it is an Enlightenment one, an attitude that regards all subjective sentiments as somehow on an equal footing. "Here I stand", we all say, and our subjective conscience--whether or not well-formed--rules the day. Sure it all began with Luther, but nowhere else will you find the extensive explosion of Protestant denominations that you find here in the United States, the World Headquarters of the Democracy of Ideas. Here, if you don't like the way your local church is being run, you just run out and start your own.

The American love affair with freethinking naturally subsidizes this tendency to prop up whatever views one happens antecedently to hold with pseudo-arguments grounded in sophomoric readings of history and theology. Ironically it is by virtue of working in academia myself that I can see that the foundations for this attitude are already in place when students come to college. So perhaps I should not attribute this attitude to those features of the academic lifestyle that collectively tend to make college professors rather tiresome people; it really is something fundamentally part of American life itself, it seems.

In the papal speech that Tom cites we hear of two "readings" of Vatican II, one the Holy Father calls the "hermeneutics of discontinuity and rupture", the other he calls the "hermeneutics of reform". According to the former, Vatican II represents a fundamental break from the past, with the opening windows of aggiornamento representing a chance for us to escape from the fetters of the past that had everyone's mind "checked at the door" for so many centuries. According to the latter, the Council is rather a renewal of the continuity that is the development of the doctrine of the Magisterium that is always one with Our Lord. In the teaching of young people it is easy to see why the hermeneutics of discontinuity and rupture would be the more appealing, at least in this American culture of ours. The young are often attracted to change for its own sake, and there is also a tendencey among some to want to experience the excitement of rebellion and the rejection of what was widely accepted by earlier generations. The hermeneutics of reform are, in a sense, more conservative in nature, and conservatism is not popular among the young or at universities these days, if it ever was.

Which hermeneutics one believes to be the "correct" will be a function of one's attitude towards hermeneutics generally. If one is a devotee of the hermeneutics of discontinuity it is probably because one is already committed to a kind of postmodern rejection of the notion of objective truth. Simili modo those to whom the hermeneutics of reform is attractive will be those folks for whom the Magisterium represents the last vestige of moral and theological realism. Only the former, however, could ever endorse the intellectual egalitarianism that Free Speech Americans have enthroned above the Gospels, and they would think and argue that way whether or not they engaged in more reading and arguing about Church documents.

Happy Birthday Darwins!

No, not Charles, but Mr. and Mrs.: today is the anniversary of the blog DarwinCatholic, one of my favorites for sanity and sanctity.

One of the great things about the Darwins, in my view, is the way in which they combine sound, orthodox Catholicism, clear and concise conservatism, and healthy, objective scientific skepticism. They illustrate quite nicely how one can be a successful Christian humanist without sacrificing the norms of truth in this time of fundamentalist dogmatic ideology.

Here's to many more years of happy reading!

Show Me That You Mean It

In a comment on my post of yesterday on the anti-intellectualism of Peter Berkowitz and John Derbyshire, an old student of mine remarks that there is a non-cognitive aspect to moral reasoning that naturally makes most of us a little nervous about the sorts of “bright line” arguments against abortion offered by Ramesh Ponnuru and Hadley Arkes, among others.

I'm inclined to agree with Apollodorus that arguments--even pretty good ones--can be constructed to fit just about any purpose. In particular, I agree that the "reasons" that are often given for permitting a certain degree of latitude in moral arguments are sometimes very attractive from a subjective point of view. The trouble I have with this sort of approach, though, is the very arbitrariness that it introduces. One person feels sympathetic to one set of circumstances, another feels sympathetic to another. Why ought we to honor the sympathies of one person rather than another, particularly when such sympathies are always a function of that particular individual's own passions and desires?

This is a particularly pressing problem, I think, when the issue involves harm to others. It's one thing, for example, to say that some folks can handle polygamy, others can't, that some societies can tolerate the pressures introduced by such a system while others can't (though there is a fairly interesting article in The Weekly Standard that argues that polygamy is not conducive to democracy). But to suggest that there are some circumstances that warrant the intentional killing of an innocent human being is to stray quite far from moral reality.

Clearly there are cases in which it is justifiable to take a human life--if only in self-defense. Those cases are at least arguably not instances of the taking of an innocent human life. When we kill in self-defense, it must always be as a last resort, when the intentions of our assailant are crystal clear (if that is ever possible) and our options limited to just the one response: kill or be killed.

This is clearly not the case with the vast majority--if not the sum total--of abortions, including very early ones and very late ones. There are almost always alternatives available to the killing of the innocent human being in the womb, and it is a curious irony that very often it is the same folks who demand extraordinary precautions in such things as the use of the death penalty, the prosecution of war, and the use of lethal means of self-defense who suddenly become like marshmallows when it comes to allowing an abortion.

The fact that we feel sympathy for a particular person's situation does not entail that we ought to permit that person to do whatever s/he feels must be done; we are still capable of looking at the situation from the point of view of the other, equally innocent, human being involved and asking: if I were in that fetus's baby slippers, would I want my mother to hire a doctor to kill me?

Let those who can unequivocally answer "yes" to that question check themselves into the nearest mental hospital.

Having said all of that, I must agree with Apollodorus when he writes

I find myself frankly overwhelmed by the number of obstacles that stand in the way of a good solution to the problems that drive people towards abortion in the first place, and usually give up in face of the complexity.

This is a temptation for virtually everyone who engages the anti-abortion argument with any vehemence. It is too easy to get involved in the argument itself, working inexorably towards that conclusion that we see must follow from the logic of morals, and to forget about what must be done out there in the real world once we have proven our point to the satisfaction of most people. On an Aristotelian account of morality, of course, this would not need to be said, since for the Aristotelian virtue is not merely made manifest by action, it is made complete therein. It is not enough to combat anti-intellectualism by merely being an intellectual. One must also do something.

Ann Coulter, Suuuuuuper Geeeeenius

If anyone was operating under the assumption that Ann Coulter is a Deep Thinker, she has kindly provided them with proof to the contrary:

Cybercast News Service: Most people consider evolution to be a branch of science, or at least a scientific theory, yet in "Godless," you refer to it as a "cult" and a "fetish." What is your basis for calling it that?

Ann Coulter: There is no evidence that it is true. The fossil record contradicts it, and it is a theory that cannot be disproved. Whatever happens is said to "prove" evolution. This is the very definition of a pseudoscience, like astrology. (Of course, I would say that. I'm just a Capricorn, aren't I?)

Cybercast News Service: Creationism is not considered a science because it can't be observed or empirically tested. You assert in your book that the theory of evolution has the same problems. Why then has the U.S. public school system been willing to accept the theory of evolution, but snubbed creationism?

Ann Coulter: Because evolution is the official state religion. Although it is possible to believe in God and evolution, it is not possible to not believe in God without believing in evolution -- otherwise, atheists have no explanation for why we are here. Thus, it's very important for the liberal clergy to force small school children to believe in a discredited mystery religion from the 19th century -- evolution -- in order to prepare them to believe in the nonexistence of God, one of the main goals of the American public education system.

I'm actually a big fan of self-parody, but to be really successful it has to be done knowingly. She probably thinks she's being smart and provocative, rather than embarrassing for the rest of us. This is what happens when you learn your "science" from golden tablets inscribed by space aliens.

We Are All Sinners

That's a common enough platitude in the Church these days, but Bishop Brown of Orange, California, seems to take it a little more seriously than most, because on his account just about every single person in this country is in a state of mortal sin every time they recite the Creed at Mass.

Whhhaaaahhh? you might reasonably wonder. Well, Bishop Brown supported Fr. Tran in his determination that those who refuse to continue standing after the Agnus Dei, in clear violation of the liturgical norms of USCCB Region XI, are in a state of mortal sin simply by virtue of their refusal to conform to the liturgical norm. Since just about every Catholic I know of fails to bow his or her head at the appropriate moment in the Creed (at the words "by the power of the Holy Spirit...") at Mass, in clear violation of the liturgical norms, which require said bowing of the head...well, you get the picture, cartoonish as it is. (See the Curt Jester for a summary of the merriment.)

When I was first received into the Church in 1983 the pastor of the parish in which I was received was one of these liturgical Nazis who insisted on forcing everyone to do things his way even when his way was very different from some very old traditions that have substantial and powerful rationales. Some of these old traditions, abandoned by the banal liturgical planners of the 1970s, have since been re-introduced into the GIRM, and rightfully so.

Liturgy, of course, is not necessarily about the continuance of every and all traditional practices--it is first and foremost about the unity of doctrine as expressed in the unity of practice, and certainly things would be much better if we all did them the same way. What one bridles at here is not the mere fact that kneeling has been abolished, but that it has been abolished in such an uncharitable manner, apparently without any regard for local practices or the feelings and sentiments of the faithful. If the feelings and sentiments of the faithful happen to be heretical, then it's not so clear that one must make allowances for them; but when the feelings and sentiments of the faithful are perfectly in keeping with what the Church herself has sometimes required, then it may be appropriate to make allowances, if only under certain conditions.

Next thing you know they'll be making it virtually impossible to hear a Latin Mass...oh, uh...hmmm...never mind.

Anti-Intellectualism

There's an interesting item, with thoughtful comment, at Darwin Catholic regarding Ramesh Ponnuru's new book, Party of Death. Apparently, Peter Berkowitz and John Derbyshire have found the pro-life argument too logically coherent, grounded in some sort of inappropriate rationalism. Feelings can be reasons, too, they say: if I feel that a fetus is important, then it is important; but if I don't feel that it's important, then it isn't.

You can get an idea of what a deep thinker Peter Berkowitz is from this excerpt:

Mr. Ponnuru insists that the embryo's unique genetic structure creates a bright line separating a "party of life" from a "party of death," that the right to abortion is indistinguishable from a license to infanticide. (On this last point, as Mr. Ponnuru notes, the famously extreme Princeton ethicist Peter Singer agrees, while defending both.) But bright lines do not always exist--in law, ethics or politics. That doesn't mean that lines cannot be drawn; they can indeed, carefully, responsibly and defensibly. But they may be neither brightly obvious nor rigidly predictable. They may even shift over time, affected by the kind of debate to which Mr. Ponnuru has made such a forceful contribution.

One can see why Mr. Berkowitz is not a huge fan of logical lines. But at least he's mildly sympathetic. Well, maybe. But whatever--Mr. Derbyshire's sympathies can be inferred from the title of his piece: "A Frigid and Pitiless Dogma." Why avail oneself of reason when sensationalism will do? His first sentence:

Can Right to Life (hereinafter RTL) fairly be called a cult?

Happily, he allows as how we don't actually have a "Führerprinzip" here in the pro-life movement, but that does not take the edge off of our committment to "a structure of perfect logical integrity." If sensationalism won't do the job, there's always condescension:

With polemical skills and intellectual firepower of this order, it is possible that RTL might break out from its natural habitat in student chapters of the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception to attain real influence in the land.

Well, he's a writer, not a thinker. We must be patient with him. When he thinks of the so-called "Party of Death", he is moved by compassion:

I see a woman who, having missed her period and found herself pregnant, has an abortion, comes home, downs a stiff drink, and gets on with her life. With her life. Here I meet a man whose loved wife has gone, never to return, yet her personless body still twitches and grunts randomly on its plastic sheet, defying years of care and therapy. Let her go, everyone begs him, and his own conscience cries; and at last he does, whichever way the law will permit. Here I find a couple who want a lively, healthy child, but who know their genes carry dark possibilities of a lifetime’s misery and an early death. They permit multiple embryos to be created, select the one free from the dread traits, and give over the rest to the use of science, or authorize their destruction.

Nothing wrong with his moral sentiments, but one does wonder where this idea that subjective experience ought to dictate the rules by which everyone else ought to live their lives. The irony, of course, is that folks such as Derbyshire appear to think that they are the ones who are being reasonable, and that it is the "pro-life cult" that is trying to "legislate morality". But just insofar as folks like Derbyshire are willing to let folks be killed simply because they "see a woman" who wants an abortion--well, the mind boggles. If one has a mind: it is not so clear that everyone does these days, at least not a functioning one.

There are some who appear to think that laws against abortion are somehow an interfering with someone else's life ("with her life"), rather than a protection of an innocent human's life. It's almost as if they would argue that laws against slavery are an interference with property-holders' lives ("with their lives") rather than a protection of oppressed humans' lives. And the only explanation that they can come up with for why they think this, is that this is how "it appears" to them, this is what "seems best"--to whom? To them. In short, we must conform to their way of viewing the world rather than to our own, and yet we are somehow the ones who want to legislate morality. There is no appeal to the harm principle or any other rational criterion to get them off the hook: even the bogus appeal to "liberty" falls flat insofar as their way of viewing the world sacrifices the lives of innocent humans who never get to enjoy any of this alleged "liberty" that comes from letting people do whatever they like.

This kind of anti-intellectualism is not at all uncommon these days, but it is a little more perplexing when it comes from those who like to pose as intellectuals. You'd think they would at least be able to put on a good show.

It's Never My Fault

There was an interesting item in yesterday's Best of the Web. A lawyer from Virginia who goes by "Dana L." when she's online complains that she was, in a certain sense, forced to have an abortion by the Bush administration. Writing in the Washington Post (where else?) she tells a story about how she got caught up in a romantic moment with her husband and, "in a sudden rush of passion", neglected to insert her diaphragm. Oops. She also seems to have neglected to ask her husband to use a condom, and he apparently also did not think of using one. Oops. So she calls her doctor in the morning to get a Plan B, a pill that, if taken within 72 hours of intercourse, can prevent implantation. But her doctor refused to give her one, that scumbag, as did the internist on duty. It seems that "health-care practitioners apparently are allowed to refuse to prescribe any drug that goes against their beliefs." What an outrage!

So why not call Planned Parenthood? "Unfortunately for me, in my panic that Friday, I didn't even think of calling them." Oops.

Next thing she knew, she was pregnant. That's a little harder to forget about than inserting a diaphragm, using a condom, or calling Planned Parenthood, so she had enough of her wits about her to finally haul her sorry ass over to Planned Parenthood and get an abortion.

Since it was a Bush-era FDA decision to keep Plan B available only by prescription, Dana wants to blame the Bush administration for her needing to have an abortion. One wonders whether, "in [her] panish that Friday", she would have been able to remember that it was available over the counter even if it had been, but no matter--it's not a matter of her failing memory, but of "religion" creeping into American politics:

All the while, I was thinking that if religion hadn't been allowed to seep into American politics the way it has, I wouldn't even be there. This all could have been stopped way before this baby was conceived if they had just let me have that damn pill.

I wonder where this "if they had just let me have that damn pill" comes from? It seems to me that it was readily available to her from her friends at Planned Parenthood, if she had only thought to give them a call. What she really seems to be complaining about is not that she couldn't get "that damn pill", but that getting "that damn pill" wasn't convenient enough to suit her. Apparently, whenever things are not easy enough for her to do in her own way, whatever happens as a result of her failing to do anything at all has got to be somebody else's fault, because surely she would have done something if only it had been a little easier.

Looking back, I see I wrote "oops" three times. At each of those times, something could have been done to prevent the pregnancy. None of those times was the responsibility of the Bush administration--each represents a failure on the part of Dana L., or her husband, or both, to be responsible about what they were doing.

If I ever get in trouble for killing somebody while driving drunk, I'm going to want to have Dana L. on my defense team!

The Time Warp

I've just returned from a trip up to Oberlin to attend the wedding of my niece, who is an Oberlin alumna, as is her new husband. Well, actually he's an alumnus, not an alumna, but I won't delve too deeply into that.

If living in Athens, Ohio, is a little like taking a trip back to the Summer of Love, living in Oberlin must be a little like taking a trip back to the early 1970s. Much hippiedom was in evidence, though of a clearly later vintage than what one finds in Athens, where tie-dye is still popular and deodorant unpopular. I've only been to Oberlin a few times in my life, so I can't really say for sure what life there would be like, but it seems little changed since the first time I went there, which was indeed in the early 1970s, when my class took regular field trips over there to hear concerts and attend plays. More recently I was there once or twice to visit my niece when she was still in school, and it was as if I'd never left the place. This past weekend was no different in that regard.

In some ways that kind of stasis is a salutary thing. Oberlin has always been famous as a place where widely accepted bigotries and injustices were rejected and openly defied. Oberlin was the first college to admit women, blacks, Native Americans, and it was a prominent station along the Underground Railroad. Students used to organize diversions to distract and foil the "slave catchers" who would come north from Southern states. It was pressure from citizens of Oberlin and other like-minded places that got legislation passed that made it mandatory for "slave catchers" to have exact identifications of the "slaves" they were catching--which, happily, was often difficult if not impossible to obtain. That sort of moral rectitude is still much in evidence in and around Oberlin, Ohio, and visiting the place makes one proud to be an Ohioan.

We stayed at a bed and breakfast just outside of town called Hallauer House, which was built in 1830 and which served as a hiding place for fugitive slaves. The proprietor had only recently discovered a "holler hole", a secret opening into underground storage areas through which escaped blacks could be warned of approaching danger.

The weather was beautiful, too, and I enjoyed attending Mass on Pentecost Sunday at a parish not far from downtown. It was fun seeing my nieces again and meeting some parts of the family that I'd never met before. All in all it was almost worth spending eight hours in a car with my own children.

Just kidding. It was great. No, really, I love bickering children. Mostly they got along fine, actually--it was only when we were all trapped in a car together that things got a little frazzled. Olivia, quite beautiful in her long yellow dress, lived it up at the reception, dancing like a dervish to some really great music provided by a jazz trio. Michael and I played chess and ping-pong, and he showed some signs of getting to the stage where he's going to start whipping my ass at both. He already whips my ass at soccer and basketball, so I suppose I should have known that it would only be a matter of time before he started dominating me in everything else. Time for me to decrease, and him to increase--it's what a parent lives for, and it makes life worth living.

Philosophy 101

Some folks may remember that I had intended to use my summer months to write a book about Aristotle's philosophy of biology. Then I bought my trumpet, and to help pay for it I signed up to teach the first session of the summer quarter.

I will be teaching Philosophy 101, that old stand-by that is designed to introduce students to the "fundamentals of philosophy." This might seem like a no-brainer: how hard could it be for a seasoned veteran to lead 20 or 30 neophytes through the most elementary aspects of philosophy for five weeks? In some respects it will be fairly easy--I will probably know the answers to at least a few of the questions they will ask me. But in many respects it is not all that easy to teach an introductory level philosophy class. The reason is not far to seek: few students these days learn the skills they need for such a class while in high school, and by the time they get to college they are not offered many chances to learn those skills.

Believe it or not, I'm talking about the skills of reading and writing--critically. Many folks can read and write, but very few college students can do it critically, that is, with the active use of critical intellect in assessing what they've read--assessing it for validity, soundness, and importance.

So one must be very wary. You can't assume that folks understand how to critique an argument for soundness, and it can be very difficult to teach them how to do it while trying to introduce them to the "fundamentals of philosophy" at the same time. One reason for this is the fact that logical analysis is really one of the tools of doing philosophy, and you can't always teach someone how to use a tool by just handing it to them and having them try it out for themselves. That might work for, say, a screwdriver, or possibly a car; but you wouldn't put someone who had never flown in his life into the pilot seat of a fighter jet and tell him to go and shoot down those enemy fighters attacking the White House.

Similarly, you can't just hand a student a philosophical text--or even a non-philosophical one--and encourage him to "go ahead, read it and analyze it for soundness, and tell me whether the argument's any good or not." For many students who are just starting out, "a good argument" is nothing other than "an argument that has a conclusion that I can readily agree with."

So my strategy is to take a different approach entirely. Instead of handing a student "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" or some other suitably watered-down masterpiece of analytic philosophy and have them "read" it and "discuss" it in class, I give them a text that shows them philosophy taking place "live". I give them a dialogue of Plato.

In particular, I will be giving them Plato's Gorgias this summer. I won't expect them to understand all of it, by any means, but I will be reading it along with them and explaining it to them along the way. It will be more like the screwdriver or the car than the fighter jet, because when you teach someone to drive a car you do put them in the driver seat but you start off in a parking lot or some other suitably obstacle-free zone. My students will be in the driver seat--they will be responsible for reading the text and making some sort of sense of it as they go along--but I will be there with my PowerPoints to keep them from driving off the road in terms of figuring out what the arguments are really about and why they are going the way they're going. With any luck, they will learn not only the fundamentals of philosophy, but the fundamentals of critical reading and thinking.

It doesn't always work, of course. I taught an introduction to ethics during the winter quarter, and at the end of the term I found a student evaluation that complained about the course, saying that "the course is supposed to be an introduction to ethics, but all we ever talked about was morality!" I suppose it's my own fault when a student says something like that--I'm the one who's supposed to be teaching them the meaning of the words, after all, but you'd think that some things would be a little more obvious than that.

I'll try to do better this summer.

The Woodwork is Teeming

Ever since Lisa's letter was published in the Athens News (see my post of yesterday for the text), folks have been writing and calling to say how much they agree with her sentiments. Where on earth are all of these people hiding? Why is the university in the crapper, governance-wise, if this view is so widely shared? Part of the answer may lie in some news we have gleaned from a couple of folks who have expresseed agreement with Lisa's letter and who have been around OU for a long enough period of time to remember the days before President Glidden.

According to one emeritus professor, it was President Ping who first lulled the Faculty Senate into giving up the power of the Faculty to vote a sitting dean out of office. If that power were restored it would go a long way towards restoring a situation that at least approaches shared governance. But one can see that it is going to be an uphill fight. The Board of Trustees has said that it will not accept any faculty evaluation of either the President or the Provost, and the University counsel has sent a letter to all faculty "forbidding" them from using any university resources (campus mail, email) to conduct any such evaluation informally. Since the University counsel does not usually act unilaterally, we must assume that either the President of the Provost put him up to it, though in the end it just made him look foolish.

One salutary effect of the counsel's letter is that it stirred up the outrage of the faculty. Not all of the faculty will agree that the university is rightfully theirs to run, but most of them will know when they are being treated like chattel. Administrators come and go; sometimes the transitions happen more quickly than at other times. This is definitely the time for a quick transition.

Free Thinking

One of the things about libertarianism that really appeals (at least to us conservatives) is the emphasis on freedom of thought and the rule of rationality in human affairs. Personally I've always been of two minds about this, however (one of the great benefits of personal intellectual freedom, I suppose, is that you can literally think whatever you want, even two different things at the same time). On the one hand, it is difficult to imagine anything more important than the dignity of the human person as manifested in the freedom to believe whatever one wants. On the other hand, it seems obvious that some beliefs are better than others--better in the sense of being more rational. Ordinarily I can see no reason to prevent folks from believing irrational things, but of course some folks with irrational beliefs have had deleterious effects on the rest of us, and that doesn't seem right.

We could invoke the harm principle: you may act on your beliefs only to the extent that your beliefs do not have deleterious effects on others. This is the line taken by many libertarians. But this is an instance of constraint, not freedom. What if I don't happen to share your belief in the harm principle? What if I get my kicks from harming others? Who are you that you get to restrain me from doing so? Why do you have the right to impose your beliefs on me? This is a tough one, at least for the libertarian. Some just blow it off, asserting that it is a straw man, that no one really holds such sociopathic attitudes, other than crazy people, and society does not, in fact, have any obligation to honor the beliefs and attitudes of crazy people. That's not much of an argument, of course, and serious libertarians don't make it; instead they look for rational grounds for constraint that don't put too great a burden on personal liberty. There is a further difficulty, however: it is impossible to establish any such grounds without invoking purely arbitrary preferences, and that approach, while it may settle the issue of the harm principle, is not an appeal to pure rationality as such.

What some folks think the role of "pure rationality as such" in moral reasoning amounts to can, on occasion, be fairly amusing. There was a very funny piece in Best of the Web Today for 30 May about an essay by libertarian Tim Kern that argues that the time wasted by the TSA in conducting searches at airports is the moral equivalent of killing 2582 people each year ("killing" here meaning time wasted standing in line). I have a good friend, also a libertarian and a specialist in moral theory, who maintains that whoever it was who was ultimately responsible for mandating the installation of seatbelts on airlines is morally responsible for the deaths of every single person who has chosen, for economic reasons, to drive rather than fly. His argument is that the mandate for seatbelts in airlines cost money that was passed on to the consumer, and some folks may prefer to drive than to pay the higher cost of flying. But the use of seatbelts in airlines is largely a waste of time, since you're dead if the plane crashes whether or not you're strapped in. And since flying is statistically much safer than driving...well, you do the math.

We all have our little foibles, of course, and it is silly to point to one or two such examples with the purpose of establishing the outlandishness of libertarian approaches to moral problems, since for every such nutty libertarian analysis there is probably an equally wacky liberal or conservative analysis, either of the same problem or of a different one. What is a little harder to explain, in my view, is the libertarian love affair with Ayn Rand. I know many smart, thoughtful libertarian philosophers, and it never ceases to amaze me how many of them consider themselves objectivists. I suppose that what attracts them are the emphasis on reason and the autonomy of the individual, but these principles are available in a wide variety of theoretical frameworks, and it remains a mystery to my why anyone would find the packaging of the Ayn Rand Institute, for example, more attractive than any of these other frameworks. To call objectivism simplistic and banal would be to give it more credit than it deserves (to see what I mean, just have a look at the video and audio samples of Rand's own words on the Institute web page--or read Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead [if you can sit through it]).

When I was growing up in the 1960s my mother was a huge fan of objectivism--she subscribed to the little journal, The Objectivist, which Rand herself published from 1966 until 1971. My mother would leave these things lying around the house, and I would often give them a look. I remember that there was always something by Rand, Peikoff, or Weiss in just about every issue--it was not an academic journal, publishing peer-reviewed articles, but more along the lines of a New Republic or National Review. I don't think I read anything with any care until I was beginning to get interested in politics in the early 70s. I remember that there was a piece, in the summer I started the 8th grade, called "The Age of Envy" or something like that, in which Rand drew a distinction between envy and hatred, arguing that the former is a natural and, indeed, humane emotion while that latter is fully inhuman. I remember agreeing with the essay at the time; I was probably just the right age for it.

De gustibus non disputandum est, as they say. Reason is not a bad thing to be constrained by, that's for sure. But one does wonder what the nature of the common good is on this construal, if it is even anything at all. Maybe moral realism is not fully compatible with this line of thought. That would be ironic, in a way, since this line of thought appears to be opposed to moral relativism.

But hey, that's the beauty of freethinking!