Incontrovertible Scriptural Evidence

In response to: "If you can provide me with clear, incontrovertible Scriptural evidence that life begins at conception, I will believe it."

You don't need clear and incontrovertible scriptural evidence. Your standard for ethical judgements should be (and, I'm sure, is) something more like 'consistency with principles drawn according to clear and incontrovertible scriptural evidence'. If you were to take clear and incontrovertible scriptural evidence as your only standard for making ethical judgements, you would be left quite without support for a number of judgements I'm sure you already make.

I could name a dozen, but one should suffice. If you were to find yourself in Durham, NC in the year 1800, somebody might well say to you, "If you can provide me with clear, incontrovertible Scriptural evidence that the African race is human, I will believe it." You would find it very difficult to give them what they want. The African race is not mentioned in scripture.

In fact, you believe that black people are human because it is consistent with principles drawn according to clear and incontrovertible scriptural evidence, not because scriptural evidence exists for the position itself. And that is a perfectly valid reason to hold an ethical judgement of that kind. Scripture was never intended to give an answer to any particular ethical question the human race can come up with (It would have to be infinitely long!) - But it provides us with some trustworthy principles from which to reason ethically.

BUT, despite the fact that no direct scriptural support exists for the position that life begins at conception, I can give you a few verses that strongly imply it. These present the speaker as having been, in the womb, a separate, unique, important, differentiable human being in the eyes of the Lord.

Psalm 139:13
For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

Jeremiah 1:5
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”

In the eyes of the Lord, the fetus is a different person from the mother.

In any case, the question of whether life begins at conception isn't even the current state of the argument. The conservative side won that point ages ago. The current state of the argument is to question whether personhood and rights begin at conception. This guy's page pretty much sums up the current state of the pro-choice argument.

I'm not going to give any actual arguments at this point, since that's not what you asked for. But I will leave you with this: The history of the last two centuries is in large part the history of the idea of human rights. Various questions arise, are resisted, and then are finally answered. Are peasants fully human? Should they have rights? Are non-whites fully human? Should they have rights? Are women fully human? Should they have rights?

It seems like a good idea to be on the "yes, they are human, yes, they have rights" side of things rather than the "no, they aren't human, no, they don't have rights" side of things.

Yes, I will be on the pro-robot rights side.

On Education and the Fourteenth Amendment

It is a simple fact that if you do not educate your children they will be taken from you. It is by this means that your child is compelled to give up some measure of their liberty. For a certain amount of time each year, they are not permitted to do as they wish, or as you would have them do. During this time they are to be educated.

If you do not want your children educated by the public schools, alternatives exist. If you have the time you may homeschool them, or, if you have the money, send them to a private school.

If you are under a certain age, there exists no legal alternative to the surrender of some part of your liberty. If you do not give it up to the public school, you must give it up to homeschooling or to a private school. The alternative is that you will be placed under some stricter form of control: You will be given to a foster family, or institutionalized, or imprisoned.

It is not your parents that put this state of affairs into place. If they disagree, it does not matter. Still you will either give up part of your liberty or have it taken from you.

I now quote Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America:

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

I am a citizen of the United States no matter how young I am. A State can deny me my liberty, as long as they maintain due process of law, but they cannot deny me the equal protection of the laws.

The reason for this Amendment is that many States were passing legislation that applied differently to African-Americans than it did to white people. What is known as the 'equal protection clause' means that the States are not permitted to either make or enforce any such law.

Is there anything in the language of this Amendment that implies in any way that while black people must be offered equality under the law, children need not be? No. Do children fall any less under the category 'all persons born or naturalized in the United States' than black people do? No. Therefore, this Amendment must apply equally to black people and to children. If it disallows any law which discriminates on the basis of race, it must also disallow any law which discriminates on the basis of age.

Children ought to be given equal protection under the law, just as much as black people or Catholics or homosexuals.

I was born in the United States. For a time the State of Maryland deprived me of liberty, and it did not do so to others who were of a different age. Those others and I were not protected equally from deprivation of our liberty.

Currently I reside in the State of North Carolina. I am not deprived of my liberty except in connection with such matters as jury duty and taxation. But when it comes to those matters, the law is equally applied to all of my fellow citizens, except for children. They are protected by law from the deprivation of liberty connected with these things, and I am not. We do not have equal protection.

Right now, children are being systematically deprived of their liberty in a way that I am not. They are undergoing education, whether or not they wish it. Those children and I are not equal under the law.

If we are to comply with the Fourteenth Amendment, education must be made optional.

Personal Notes:
1. The reason that I am not a teacher, despite the fact that I would be a good one, and that I consider education to be of primary importance, is that I do not wish to be complicit in systematic government oppression. I'm certain that many people work within the school system with a clear conscience, but I would not be able to. I don't accuse or condemn them, because I trust that they're doing what God wants them to be doing.
2. I recently used the language of human rights abuse in connection with this subject. However, I have become aware of Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states, among other things, that, "Elementary education shall be compulsory." I believe that under a philosophically consistent conception of human rights, compulsory education would be listed as an abuse, rather than as a right, but since the public idea of human rights has been so deeply influenced by this document, I don't think I'll use the language of human rights in connection with this issue, at least in short treatments.
3. I believe that an essential part of a democratic government's duty is to give its citizens the resources to discover the truth. This entails at least a system of public libraries, schools, and universities with laboratories. The government ought to spend money on such things. But having an educational system available is a very different thing from compelling citizens to spend their time making use of it.
4. Just because something is beneficial does not make it constitutional.

The Scientific Method and Repetition

Kierkegaard said, "...repetition is a crucial expression for what 'recollection' was to the Greeks. Just as they taught that all knowing is a recollecting, modern philosophy will teach that all life is a repetition."

Here's another epistemological limitation of the scientific method: It is blind to the unique.

The scientific method requires experiments repeatable by any competent observer. Moreover, the essential mode of the scientific method is to generalize from corellations to causes, and then to abstract from causes to laws. Everything that science touches, it puts through this process: Events become corellations, corellations become causes, and causes become laws. This is what the scientific method is.

So when you get a person who only believes what can be shown scientifically, that person can only believe what can be corellated. And to be corellated, it must be repeatable.

The unique experience is left out of the 'scientific worldview'. Again, this isn't to say that science isn't good. Science is great! It's a wonderful tool. But it has its limitations, and it would be foolish to suppose that because there are limitations to science, these limitations are somehow universal.

So, for instance, it's wrong to say, "Nothing exists in the universe except for particles suspended in fields of force. Science proves this." In fact, science is by its nature blind to anything except particles suspended in fields of force. It doesn't prove it -- It presupposes it.

And that's how I understand Kierkegaard's claim that modern philosophy will teach that all of life is repetition. If nothing exists except for what science can prove, and science can prove nothing that isn't repeated, then nothing exists that isn't repeated.

Nothing can be ephemeral. Nothing can be unique. If something totally unique actually did exist, the person who holds the scientific method as their entire epistemology would be unable to believe in it.

Just for thought, consider a few of the following. Can science prove that these exist? Do they exist?

1) All of existence. (There can be only one. It cannot be repeated.)
2) The last, most beautiful ice sculpture of the greatest ice sculptor ever to live.
3) A really good rock concert. (Where members of the audience lose some hearing -- which is to say, they lose part of their capacity to experience future rock concerts in the same way as they experienced this one.)

The Scientific Method and the Political

I need to go to bed, but I don't want to forget this one:

You can't let a freshman who messed up their experiment derail an entire scientific theory. Right? If somebody messes up, it doesn't count, even if THEY think they did it absolutely right.

And so we don't say that a scientific experiment must be repeatable by ALL observers, but rather that it must be repeatable by any COMPETENT observer.

But who decides who's competent? The question cannot be answered scientifically. Who would run the experiment? How would they be judged competent to run the experiment before the experiment has been run?

No, the question of competence must be decided in some other way, and this is how I understood that the scientific method must always be secondary to the political process.

By the way, our current answer to the problem of who decides competency is called the 'peer review process', and it's fundamentally political. That's not a bad thing. It works very well in very many fields, and it's been a fantastic tool for getting many great things accomplished.

But it's important to realize that this is a fundamental limitation to the scientific method, and it's one of the reasons it's abhorrent to philosophical rigor to count the scientific method as one's primary epistemological apparatus.

I'm not saying that there aren't excellent individual scientists, and even groups of them, who boldly defy the will of their political bosses in the name of truth. I am saying that when they do so, they are in a very real sense going against the nature of the scientific method.

Their first job, within that method, is to make themselves into whatever it is society considers a 'competent observer', in accord with whatever political process society puts over them to judge their competency.

I'm not sure how to end this. Here: The scientific method is great, but it has limitations, and it's not appropriate as a primary epistemology.

This Should Be Simple Ethics

Here are some ethical principles. (I'll use 'right' and 'wrong' because it's more familiar language, but really I mean 'praiseworthy' and 'blameworthy'. The question ethics asks is, "At Judgement Day, will God praise you for this action, or blame you for it?") There's a conclusion at the end of this that seems inescapable to me as long as you accept these principles, so as you read, think about whether you agree or not. Ready? Go:

1) Just because other people do something doesn't make it right. In fact, even if every other person does it, that doesn't make it even a little bit more right (or more wrong) than it would be otherwise. For example: Say a big crowd of people is kicking somebody and the person dies. You only actually kicked him once. None of you kicked him more than one time. Yet in fact each is entirely guilty of murder. There's no such thing as being guilty of one hundredth of a murder.

2) Just because you do something through intermediaries doesn't make it right. In fact, even if you aren't perfectly aware of what your henchman is doing, this doesn't reduce the blame you take for the actions done in your name. 'Plausible deniability' isn't a good enough excuse for God. For example: Say you're the head of a mafia family, and you casually mention to one of your goons that so-and-so is bothering you, and you wish he'd stop it. So your goon goes out and kills him. Just because you didn't actually pull the trigger doesn't make you any less guilty.

These two principles give us an easy way of talking about the sort of ostensibly democratic government we have now in the US. It is a big giant intermediary for all of us, acting in the name of 'the people', which is you and me.

And now, two practical corollaries to the principles above:

1') You ought to consider actions done by a crowd of which you are a part as though they had been done by you alone, because the addition of the crowd dillutes the ethics of the action not at all.

2') You ought to consider actions done by someone else in your name as though they were done by you personally.

If you accept these two principles, and you accept the idea of the democratic government as an intermediary for us all, then the unavoidable conclusion is that you are guilty of whatever wrong the government does, and you are also responsible for the right that it does.

And so here's the practical conclusion:

3) You ought not to support the government doing anything that you would not do yourself.

Would you taze your neighbor to get them to pay taxes for new roads? No? Then don't support the government doing it, because when the government does it on our behalf, this is ethically indistinguishable from you doing it personally. Would you personally waterboard somebody who might have information that would save lives? No? Then don't support the government doing it.

Used Book Store + Rainy Day =

Crazy people. They love to visit used book stores on rainy days. I've only worked at used book stores for a couple years total, but the rainy days generally stand out in my mind as times when the customers were especially irritating. In Durham we theorized that we were getting a higher than usual percentage of homeless people, coming indoors out of the weather.

But I don't think that's the case in my current job. Our customers today were mean, purposefully ignorant, rude, and obnoxious, but they had legitimate business to transact with us.

In case you think this is just in my head, my coworkers observed the phenomenon as well, at two separate locations. So either people get worse when it rains, or we get more easily irritated when it rains, or some combination of the two.

Anyway, I've found that I tend to treat customers like children when they're rude or mean. It's easier for me because I don't have to blame them: They don't know any better. And they like it. The customers enjoy being treated like children. My voice is higher and nicer, I phrase things so that mentally undeveloped people can understand them, and I repeat myself. They seem to like it, at least.

But it's not right. I ought not to treat them like children. They're adults, and they ought to be held to adult standards of behavior. If that means they get upset, at least I've respected them.

Analysis: Penny-Arcade Art Argument

Polite Prologue: I don't use this blog much, sorry, etc. Who cares? but I feel like I have to say it.

Recently Roger Ebert made the claim that video games will never be art. I don't mind very much because it's obvious to me that video games are art and I don't care what he thinks. Both Tycho and Gabe of Penny-Arcade responded, in what I think is a very telling way. These are cultural commentators who I respect very much for their depth of insight, but also (and more relevantly) for their ability to craft their message in the form most likely to penetrate their audience.

Tycho in particular is a great genius. His writing is beautiful, and his analysis is deep and self-aware even when it's misguided. Here's my point: When he writes something in a particular way, this is strong evidence that writing it that way is the best way to communicate the idea to his audience.

His writing is typical of the kind of prose that resonates with my generation. The arguments that he uses are typical of the kind of arguments that resonate with my generation. I know that they're not the only kind of arguments that Tycho is capable of -- But he's limited by his audience and his medium.

And so when I analyze his choice of arguments, I'm actually trying to (in a way) analyze my own generation, and the kinds of arguments that work on us. Also, let me be clear that I'm talking about a viewpoint I agree with. I agree with Tycho on this issue. It's not even an issue. Of course video games are art. Why discuss it?

Now is when you should read the post if you haven't already (http://www.penny-arcade.com/2010/4/21/)

Here are the arguments he makes:
A) Ironic Name-Calling: 'wretched, ancient warlock' for instance. This works because we know that he would not name-call if he were seriously attempting to engage Ebert in argument, so by name-calling he indicates that Ebert is not worthy of serious engagement.
The Flaw: Ironic Name-Calling is also Name-Calling. It ends any serious conversation.

B) Denial of Validity: This is the claim that the other guy's argument is for some reason logically invalid. Note that it does not address whether the other guy is right. Tycho uses this when he says "in an internally contradictory way" and "with nebulously defined terms".
The Flaw: There are two kinds of arguments that look invalid: Ones that are invalid, and ones you just don't understand yet. Nebulously defined terms are often just terms you don't understand, and the appearance of internal contradiction often follows directly from such misunderstanding. The best response, if one is arguing seriously, is to get clarification, not to deny the validity of the argument. Take a lesson from Socrates, who when faced with this, would only ask questions, thus forcing his interlocutors to show the internal contradiction themselves.

C) Denial of Dialogue: This is the direct claim that the other guy is not worthy of serious engagement (Ironic Name-Calling only implies it). If Ebert is arguing "in bad faith", then it frees Tycho from having to argue well. He says, "He is not talking to you, he is just talking".
The Flaw: Once this has been deployed by either side, all serious argument ends.

D) The Hegel: This is the claim that the other person's argument is a necessary part of some historical development, and need not be considered seriously. Tycho uses it when he says, "He's simply a man determined to be on the wrong side of history". Gabe deploys this one as well.
The Flaw: This invalidates your own argument, which must also be a necessary part of some historical development, since it's an antithesis to the other guy's thesis.
Note: The attached comic makes it clear that they are aware that their own arguments are also vulnerable to The Hegel, which means that the argument as deployed in the comic would more properly be called The Ironic Hegel. The Ironic Hegel, however, doesn't show up in the newspost.

E) The Ironic Appeal to Authority: This is when you say, essentially, "I could make an appeal to authority, but I don't respect authority, and so I won't". In this case, Gabe makes a claim to authority, but in a way that makes it clear that he's not serious about it. It works well because Ebert is considered an authority on art. In one stroke he can establish his own authority and undermine the other guy's.
The Flaw: In one stroke he has undermined his own authority and established the other guy's.

Here's my point: None of these address the issue at hand. The medium and the audience are simply not capable of sustaining an actual substantial discussion of such an important issue. These are arguments in that nether region somewhere between a true argument and an ad hominem, and it's where my generation lives.

We're floating.