I would never get a tattoo, especially not one like this. But I have to admire the quality of the artwork.
(At Diana's insistence, I am not posting the actual image itself, so you'll have to click through to see it. Her immediate reaction when she saw the image was, "EEEK! GROSS! YUCK!")
If you wish to inform yourself about the most important cultural issue of our time, then you'd better scurry over to Flibbertigibbet to discuss whether a man with a murse lacks the necessary masculine gravitas.
Personally, I'm with Flibby.
*grumble*
I've been having terrible problems with Blogger lately, but particularly today. As a result, some of my comment scripts aren't working correctly. Those scripts depend on information in the files that Blogger produces, but Blogger hasn't been reliably producing the files with that information. Plus, Blogger's upload of the files to my server has been hit-or-miss -- and mostly miss.
I hope that the problems will be wholly sorted out in the next few days. In the meantime, I'll create work-arounds as best I can. However, you'll just have to be patient, as even those are difficult to implement due to Blogger's problems.
Hopefully, this post will publish in some reasonable amount of time. I won't hold my breath, though!
I'm delighted to announce the addition of yet another guest blogger to the illustrious ranks of NoodleFood: Gina Liggett.
I've been very impressed with Gina's contributions to FIRM over the past year and a half. She stepped up to the plate, in a big way. I hope to contribute to her opposition to the proposed "personhood" amendment to the Colorado Constitution. (That's the subject of her first post, to be published shortly.) And, of course, I'm enthused to see what she writes for NoodleFood! Read more...Gina Liggett is a nurse and freelance writer in Denver, Colorado. She's studied Objectivism for more than 20 years and contributes to Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine (FIRM) and Front Range Objectivism. In addition to philosophy, she's interested in religion, politics, individual rights, international affairs, health care policy, science, and fitness. She dances ballet, jazz, and salsa, plays golf, and speaks French and Spanish. Gina can be reached at GLiggett@comcast.net.
In a lengthy post entitled Dissecting Epistemology, Monica challenges the objectivity of many of our supposedly scientific beliefs about the world. She writes,
Apart from the obvious idea that much of science is ideologically driven, many scientists - irrespective of any underlying, driving ideology - have deliberately cooked data and managed to get it published in scientific journals for no other reason than the fact that they are second-handed and they want to be right. And of course, scientific history is also rife with examples of new ideas taking time to become established in the mainstream due to a lack of objectivity in the scientific community. Just take that "quacky" idea that bacteria might cause ulcers!! We scientists "know" that bacteria can't inhabit stomach acid!? Right?? Most commonly of all, in my opinion, is not intellectual dishonesty but the fact that shoddy science is done all the time and people just fail to fully and objectively evaluate that research. Sometimes, those claims then end up becoming part of the "objective scientific consensus" that persists for 50 years.To say, "I've not studied the issue, so I just don't know," is often the most objective, the most self-aware, and the most honest reply possible to an inquiry. Sometimes, it's also the hardest reply.
This cool time lapse movie shows a passage of a tanker through the Panama Canal in 75 Seconds.
The Panama Canal Authority website states, "The history of the construction of the Panama Canal is the saga of human ingenuity and courage: years of sacrifice, crushing defeat, and final victory. Many gave their life in the effort. Follow the story from the early days of the French construction period, to the completion by the United States, and into the present time."
More details of the history of this amazing creation can be found here. And of course there's a Wikipedia article.
(Via Joost Bonsen.)
This news story -- High gas prices drive farmer to switch to mules -- is straight out of Atlas Shrugged:
MCMINNVILLE, Tenn. - High gas prices have driven a Warren County farmer and his sons to hitch a tractor rake to a pair of mules to gather hay from their fields. T.R. Raymond bought Dolly and Molly at the Dixon mule sale last year. Son Danny Raymond trained them and also modified the tractor rake so the mules could pull it.What could better concretize the damaging economic effects of government regulations strangling energy production than this return to mule power? If such exists, I can't think of it!
T.R. Raymond says the mules are slower than a petroleum-powered tractor, but there are benefits.
"This fuel's so high, you can't afford it," he said. "We can feed these mules cheaper than we can buy fuel. That's the truth."
And Danny Raymond says he just likes using the mules around the farm. "We've been using them quite a bit," he said.
Brother Robert Raymond added, "It's the way of the future."
Climate change on the planet Jupiter is causing it to develop another Red Spot:
In what's beginning to look like a case of planetary measles, a third red spot has appeared alongside its cousins — the Great Red Spot and Red Spot Jr. — in the turbulent Jovian atmosphere.I'm sure this must be mankind's fault somehow... Read more...
This third red spot, which is a fraction of the size of the two other features, lies to the west of the Great Red Spot in the same latitude band of clouds.
...The Hubble and Keck images may support the idea that Jupiter is in the midst of global climate change, as first proposed in 2004 by Phil Marcus, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. The planet's temperatures may be changing by 15 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit. The giant planet is getting warmer near the equator and cooler near the South Pole. He predicted that large changes would start in the southern hemisphere around 2006, causing the jet streams to become unstable and spawn new vortices.
Americans are used to abortion as being a hot button issue in politics. Hence, I found this article from The Economist to be an interesting contrast object of how the issues could play out politically in a system without quite such a strong religious undercurrent. In the case, the issue was a proposed law to change the cutoff point for a legal abortion from 24 weeks gestation to 22 weeks. Here are a few excerpts:
BRITONS, thankfully, have been spared America's abortion wars. Political candidates' positions on the matter are of little interest to the electorate. More Conservatives are "pro-life" and more Labour MPs "pro-choice", but allegiances are rarely, if ever, based on this single issue. This is partly because Britain is less religious than America, but also because abortion laws are made in Parliament, where shades of grey can be debated, not in the courts, where black or white usually prevails.Clearly, religion still has some influence in the debates, although not as strong as in the US. The interesting question will be whether this influence increases or decreases over the next several years. Read more...
...By precedent, votes on abortion are "free": MPs may vote according to their consciences rather than a party directive. They still divided along party lines. Most Labour MPs—including the prime minister, Gordon Brown—voted against all the amendments, although three Catholic cabinet ministers supported a cut to 12 weeks. Most of the shadow cabinet voted for some reduction, and the Conservative leader, David Cameron, backed lowering the limit to either 22 or 20 weeks.
...The day before that, MPs had voted on two other amendments. The first would have prohibited experiments involving "chimera" embryos created by placing human DNA inside empty eggs from other mammals. The second sought to rule out creating "saviour siblings": screening embryos created by IVF in order to select a match for an existing sick child whose life could be saved by cord blood or bone marrow from a suitable brother or sister.
All three issues went the government's way, even though Mr Brown had to allow his party a free vote after a campaign by Catholic bishops made it clear that he risked losing three ministers if he did not.
I really love Gus Van Horn's suggestion of calling "carbon credits" by their proper name: "fuel rations." It's just too perfect, particularly the wake of the recommendation of Britain's influential Environmental Audit Committee that every person be forced to use a "carbon ration card" to purchase "petrol, airline tickets or household energy."
Instead, I propose that the government dole out those cards to anyone who advocates or votes for such horrid legislation. Much better, no?
(Previous in the series: The Best and Worst in Human History.)
Taking on "New Atheists" such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, Dinesh D'Souza explains that he wants to strip away a kind of pose: atheists, he says, present themselves as men of data and evidence, merely following where it leads, when in reality they are faith-filled dogmatists who only assume that there are no gods and that miracles are not possible. In his debate with Hitchens, he drove this home by asking his opponent to name just one scientific law which he knows has no exceptions. Hitchens admitted he couldn't and had to stand there sheepishly while D'Souza crowed that he was leaving room for miracles even while denying them without investigation—that the atheist stance for science and against miracles is only based on faith in certain "metaphysical assumptions." In his view, the real difference between scientists and theologians is that religious people have enough integrity to admit their beliefs are rooted in faith.
D'Souza's effectiveness in exposing confusion and sowing skepticism illustrates how the New Atheists and most scientists lack an objective philosophical foundation. With a little training in the actual relationship between philosophy and science, they could explain how science is not perched atop blind faith in "metaphysical assumptions," and they could articulate exactly why miracles should not be dismissed as merely improbable, or even as inherently unverifiable, but as outright incoherent. In fact, they would know the issue is as stark as this: if miracles are possible, then science isn't.
To see why, let's begin by looking at what a miracle has to be. We are not talking about just any improbable happening, and not even something which violates our current understanding of the world as expressed in scientific laws, like D'Souza tries to argue. The entire point of miracles is to provide evidence of divine intervention, and surprises which may only reveal a current lack of understanding can't accomplish that: by that measure, even the tricks of magicians would count as miracles. Indeed, much of what we enjoy in our modern world would have been considered miraculous in previous times, from vaccines and medications, to cars, and the Internet and on and on. Yet none of these prove or even suggest a possibility that there is a God. No, a meaningful miracle is not merely something which would violate the laws of nature as we currently understand them, but something which would be a violation of any such law we could ever discover. That is, it would have to be a violation of lawfulness itself. That's a tall order.
Causality and Identity
When we talk about how things act and what they do and why, we are talking about causality. As Aristotle observed some 2500 years ago, things act according to their natures (their identities). They act the way they do because of what they are—balls roll when pushed, and piles of dirt don’t. Eggs break when dropped because that is an expression of their identity as things with a brittle shell and goo inside, crashing against a hard floor. Action is an expression of identity, and to understand why and how things act the way they do, we seek to understand what those things are. We seek to understand their identities. So if an egg broke into song instead of a messy puddle, it wouldn't be a normal egg—it would have to be something else. Because identities include capacities for action, we know and classify things by what they do, too.
The crucial thing to keep in mind about action being an expression of identity is that everything has identity merely in virtue of existing, not because of any dictate. Think of this as a law of existence, something true of Being itself. As Ayn Rand observed some 50 years ago: to be, is to be something—to be something particular, to be this and not that, to be capable of these actions and reactions and transformations, and not those. Or from the opposite perspective: to not be anything particular, is to simply not be. And this is not any article of faith or merely a "metaphysical assumption." This is a philosophical axiom reaching below any will to the bedrock of existence itself, a self-evident truth that lies at the base of all truths and all thinking, a fact so absolute and inescapable that it is actually reaffirmed by any attempt to deny it.
It is this ironclad law of existence that tells us there are scientific laws to pursue in the first place. It is how we can have absolute confidence that we are in a position to plumb the depths of the world, that we can seek to understand the identities of the things which are acting and interacting in nature, and that it is worth working to understand it all in terms of ever broader and deeper principles. The fruitfulness of this pursuit can't be denied: just look around and marvel at how our striving for a rational, scientific understanding of the world has improved our lives in countless ways.
And it is this very same law of existence that also guarantees there can be no miracles for us to pursue. If we were to somehow experience an "egg miracle," it isn’t that we would have found something we thought was a regular egg that surprised us and needs more study. No, the very idea of miracles requires violating causality. It requires that a normal egg break into song. Or picking something from the Christian tradition: it requires a normal loaf of bread to break into 1000 servings. In short, a genuine miracle requires a thing to act against its own identity—to have a contradictory identity—to literally not be what it is, which is incoherent. Everything is what it is, and contradictions can only exist inside peoples' confused thinking.
Either-Or
That is why it is one or the other, science or miracles. Accepting the possibility of miracles means rejecting the very basis of science; accepting the basis of science means rejecting any possibility of miracles. Indeed, to the degree that scientists entertain the possibility of miracles, they tragically undercut their own psychological motive and ability to pursue such knowledge: there is no point in looking for the laws of nature when existence isn't actually lawful and there is no real understanding to be found. Even if scientists think they can be "practical" and approach the world as being "almost always lawful," they are still fatally compromised because every surprise they meet could be a clue that an idea is in need of refinement or correction—or it could be an inexplicable miracle from the arbitrary will of God. The harder and more important the puzzle, the harder it will be to resist that nihilistic pull to simply throw up their hands and give up being a scientist to blindly assert that it must be an arbitrary intervention.
All of those potential advances lost to scientists giving up on science are a tragedy—and any effort spent repelling that call to give up is a waste. At the dawn of science, Francis Bacon said that "nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." Knowledge is power precisely because existence is in fact lawful, and every advance we've achieved up through the wonders of modern civilization is a brilliant testament to this simple truth.
(Upcoming in the series: The Gap in Religious Thought and Morality and Life.)
John Lewis has an excellent post on the rise of fundamentalist Islam in Turkey on Principles in Practice, highlighting the actual commands of the Koran that "an agency of the Turkish government [the "Presidency of Religious Affairs and the Religious Charitable Foundation"] will use as its basic guide for the next century." It's not good, as you might imagine.
Also, for my Israeli readers, Dr. Lewis will be speaking at Tel Aviv University on June 2nd. He writes:
I will be speaking at Tel Aviv University, Israel. on June 2, 2008, 18:00-20:00, Room 133 Gilman Building. The talk is sponsored by the Moshe Dayan Center. Thanks to Boaz Arad for arranging the invitation, and to the Ayn Rand Institute for logistical support.I'd love to hear that talk!
Mr. Arad has translated my article 'No Substitute for Victory': The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism into Hebrew, for the journal Nativ [20.3, May-June, 2007]. [The Hebrew translation is here.] He has also translated my article 'Gifts from Heaven': The Meaning of the American Defeat of Japan, 1945 for the website Anochi. [The Hebrew translation is here.] Mr. Arad also translated an article by Yaron Brook and Alex Epstein entitled 'Just War Theory' vs. American Self-Defense, also from The Objective Standard.
Abstract of the talk: "The Inner Jihad and Islamic Totalitarianism."
This talk confronts and repudiates claims that jihad is not war, but rather a benign "inner struggle." These claims are ahistorical, and run contrary to the energetic statements of those waging war for Islam today. The purpose of such claims is to obfuscate the goal of imposing Islamic law by force. The outward manifestation of such obfuscation is the censorship and propaganda that exists in the Middle East today. This lecture will consider the relationship between this intellectual corruption and the rise of totalitarian Islam, a foe that must be confronted intellectually and defeated militarily.
As everyone knows, the market for coffee products in the Seattle area is fiercely competitive. The quest for customers have led one entrepreneur to develop the "sexy espresso stand":
Espresso drive-through stands with bikini- and lingerie-sporting baristas are popping up from Monroe to Edmonds. In the past year, at least six of these java joints employing provocatively dressed young women have opened in the county. A few owners of these roadside stands say business is so brisk, they're hiring more employees and have plans to open new locations.
...Sometimes wearing little more than pasties and bikini bottoms, the scantily clad baristas at Wheeler's stands have scores of well-tipping customers.
Ayn Rand's masterpiece Atlas Shrugged ends when the lights go out in the world:
The plane was above the peaks of the skyscrapers when suddenly, with the abruptness of a shudder, as if the ground had parted to engulf it, the city disappeared from the face of the earth. It took them a moment to realize that the panic had reached the power stations---and that the lights of New York had gone out. . . .In the novel, the lights go out as a result of willful evasion -- the refusal of the world's leaders to acknowledge that it is the power of the mind to reform nature in its own image that keeps the world alight. Evil enough, as far as it goes.
She remembered the story Francisco had told her: "He had quit the Twentieth Century. He was living in a garret in a slum neighborhood. He stepped to the window and pointed at the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done."
Kivalina is home to 402 residents, who live in very overcrowded conditions in just over 70 homes. The community is predominately Alaska Native, and residents depend on subsistence activities for a majority of their caloric intake. The community does not have a piped water or sewer system, except for running/piped water in its school and washeteria. Residents rely on self-haul water and on honey buckets for human waste.
[T]he suit also accuses eight of the firms (American Electric Power, BP America, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Duke Energy, ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy, and Southern Company) of conspiring to cover up the threat of man-made climate change, in much the same way the tobacco industry tried to conceal the risks of smoking—by using a series of think tanks and other organizations to falsely sow public doubt in an emerging scientific consensus.In other words, attorneys plan to throw the tobacco playbook at rich energy companies. The message the case wishes to convey is that energy companies knowingly caused global warming and must pay for the damage they've wrought by selling the fossil fuels that provide the world with energy.
On this Memorial Day, I would like to honor the three men of the American Civil War who understood the terrible need for total war: President Abraham Lincoln, General Ulysses S. Grant, and General William T. Sherman. Their vigorous prosecution of the war preserved the Union, the very first nation founded on the principles of individual rights -- and, at the time, the only such nation. In so doing, they ended the most loathsome violation of rights ever known to man: chattel slavery. Without them, without the brave Union soldiers who fought under them, America would not exist today.*
So thank you, Mssrs. Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman. We are forever in your debt.
* For the details, I strongly recommend reading James McPherson's stellar history of the Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom.
As should be perceptually self-evident to anyone viewing this web site, I've updated the template. If you have any problems or complaints, please let me know via e-mail or in the comments.
It's change all-around here at NoodleFood!
Update: I've now integrated the comments into the post pages, as well as added the number of comments for each post to the main page. All the old links to pages and comments are still good, however. Everything seeming to be working well, although Blogger needs to republish the whole blog for everything to work right. That's done by now, I hope.
Update #2: Nope, still fighting with Blogger to republish the whole blog. In the meantime, comments have been moved to each post page and the number of comments for each post now appears with each post.
Rebecca Walker describes the damage of growing up as the daughter of famous feminist Alice Walker:
My mother's feminist principles coloured every aspect of my life. As a little girl, I wasn't even allowed to play with dolls or stuffed toys in case they brought out a maternal instinct. It was drummed into me that being a mother, raising children and running a home were a form of slavery. Having a career, travelling the world and being independent were what really mattered according to her.By that, she means that she voluntarily became a mother. Happily, Ms. Walker seems to have made a very good life for herself, despite her unenviable upbringing. Read more...
I love my mother very much, but I haven't seen her or spoken to her since I became pregnant. She has never seen my son -- her only grandchild. My crime? Daring to question her ideology.
Monica has blogged this funny news story from Mexico about a donkey jailed for assault and battery:
A donkey is doing time in southern Mexico for assault and battery.Along related lines, here's a picture of a bird clearly thumbing its nose at the law:
The animal was locked up at a local jail that normally holds people for public drunkenness and other disturbances after it bit and kicked two men near a ranch in Chiapas state, police said Monday.
Officer Sinar Gomez said the donkey will remain behind bars until its owner agrees to pay the men's medical bills.
"Around here, if someone commits a crime they are jailed," Gomez said — "no matter who they are."
When Diana and I visited Washington DC last month for a conference, we had a special treat of an impromptu tour of local sculpture by Nicholas Provenzo.
For those who want to get a taste of the aesthetic analysis Nick is capable of, I'd like to refer you to his recent blog post, "Four Great American Paintings (Part 1)". It's a very nice discussion of the meaning of the work in a Romantic school vein.
I look forward to reading his next 3 commentaries!
According to New Scientist, 16% of US science teachers are creationists. The following data is from a 2007 random survey of nearly 2000 US high school science teachers:
When Berkman's team asked about the teachers' personal beliefs, about the same number, 16% of the total, said they believed human beings had been created by God within the last 10,000 years.And what do science teachers actually teach in the classroom?
Despite a court-ordered ban on the teaching of creationism in US schools, about one in eight high-school biology teachers still teach it as valid science, a survey reveals. And, although almost all teachers also taught evolution, those with less training in science – and especially evolutionary biology – tend to devote less class time to Darwinian principles.I find it deeply disturbing that an American child's only formal exposure to one of the fundamental principle of modern biological science may come from a government school teacher who is willing to let his own personal religious beliefs bias his portrayal of the facts.
...[A] quarter of the teachers also reported spending at least some time teaching about creationism or intelligent design. Of these, 48% – about 12.5% of the total survey – said they taught it as a "valid, scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species".
Just when you thought American politics couldn't get any worse, Maxine Waters threatens to nationalize the oil industry, if consumer prices aren't to her liking:
Of course, Maxine Waters wouldn't ever support the genuine cure for high energy prices, namely the elimination of government controls on drilling for and refining oil, as well as on other forms of energy like coal and nuclear power. As any semi-conscious student in a microeconomics class knows, such controls constrict supply and drive up prices. But nevermind that mumbo-jumbo. Maxine Waters has a different kind of plan: oil company executives must find some way to magically violate the basic laws of economics -- or else!
(Via Kelly McNulty on FRODO)
This story of a Dartmoth English professor threatening to sue her students for challenging her postmodernist views is beyond mind-bloggling. I can't help but quote the whole article, as the insanity just never ends:
Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their "anti-intellectualism" violated her civil rights.That's absolutely abominable behavior for a professor. It's good that students question what they're taught in college, rather than simply swallowing it, regurgitating it for the exams and papers, and then forgetting about it. Students have every right to be skeptical of some pet theory of a professor -- and to express objections to it in class. The professor should make the best arguments he can, then move on, accepting that students will make up their own minds about the material. Certainly, despite my strong views on various subjects, that's always what I strive to do in my own teaching.
Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of "French narrative theory" that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional expos&e, which she promises will "name names."
The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.
Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. "My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful," she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. "They'd argue with your ideas." This caused "subversiveness," a principle English professors usually favor.
Ms. Venkatesan's scholarly specialty is "science studies," which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, "teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth." She continues: "Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct."The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan's seminar, then, was to "problematize" technology and the life sciences. Students told me that most of the "problems" owed to her impenetrable lectures and various eruptions when students indicated skepticism of literary theory. She counters that such skepticism was "intolerant of ideas" and "questioned my knowledge in very inappropriate ways." Ms. Venkatesan, who is of South Asian descent, also alleges that critics were motivated by racism, though it is unclear why.
After a winter of discontent, the snapping point came while Ms. Venkatesan was lecturing on "ecofeminism," which holds, in part, that scientific advancements benefit the patriarchy but leave women out. One student took issue, and reasonably so – actually, empirically so. But "these weren't thoughtful statements," Ms. Venkatesan protests. "They were irrational." The class thought otherwise. Following what she calls the student's "diatribe," several of his classmates applauded.
Ms. Venkatesan informed her pupils that their behavior was "fascist demagoguery." Then, after consulting a physician about "intellectual distress," she cancelled classes for a week. Thus the pending litigation.
Such conduct is hardly representative of the professoriate at Dartmouth, my alma mater. Faculty members tend to be professional. They also tend to be sane.
That said, even at -- or especially at -- putatively superior schools, students are spoiled for choice when it comes to professors who share ideologies like Ms. Venkatesan's. The main result is to make coursework pathetically easy. Like filling in a Mad Libs, just patch something together about "interrogating heteronormativity," or whatever, and wait for the returns to start rolling in.
I once wrote a term paper for a lit-crit course where I "deconstructed" the MTV program "Pimp My Ride." A typical passage: "Each episode is a text of inescapable complexity . . . Our received notions of what constitutes a ride are constantly subverted and undermined." It received an A.
Where the standards are always minimum, most kids simply float along with the academic drafts, avoid as much work as possible and accept the inflated grade. Why not? It's effortless, and there are better ways to spend time than thinking deeply about ecofeminism.
The remarkable thing about the Venkatesan affair, to me, is that her students cared enough to argue. Normally they would express their boredom with the material by answering emails on their laptops or falling asleep. But here they staged a rebellion, a French Counter-Revolution against Professor Defarge. Maybe, despite the professor's best efforts, there's life in American colleges yet.
Paul and I haven't been watching movies lately, as we've been enjoying Alias from the first season. (It's my third watching of the series, I think. The first two seasons are particularly excellent.)
However, tonight we watched the movie Derailed. It was a surprisingly good movie, with solid acting, a clear but twisty plot, and an unusual theme.
I'd be curious to hear what others thought of it, but please add any necessary spoiler alerts in your comments.
Oh, why bother with knowing the economics of supply and demand, when a person could just pray for lower gas prices?
Rocky Twyman has a radical solution for surging gasoline prices: prayer.Ah yes, giving recommendations to God would be the sin of pride, I suppose.
Twyman -- a community organizer, church choir director and public relations consultant from the Washington, D.C., suburbs -- staged a pray-in at a San Francisco Chevron station on Friday, asking God for cheaper gas. He did the same thing in the nation's Capitol on Wednesday, with volunteers from a soup kitchen joining in. Today he will lead members of an Oakland church in prayer.
Yes, it's come to that.
"God is the only one we can turn to at this point," said Twyman, 59. "Our leaders don't seem to be able to do anything about it. The prices keep soaring and soaring."
Gas prices have been driven relentlessly higher this year by the bull market for crude oil, gasoline's main ingredient. A gallon of regular now costs $3.89, on average, in California, while the national average has hit $3.58.
To solve the problem, Twyman isn't begging the Lord for any specific act of intervention. He is not asking God to make OPEC pump more oil. Nor is he praying for all the speculative investors to be purged from the New York Mercantile Exchange, where crude oil is traded. Instead, he says anyone who wants to follow his example should keep it simple. "God, deliver us from these high gas prices," Twyman said. "That's all they have to say."
In the firefight between Christian apologist Dinesh D'Souza and "New Atheists" such as Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris, the New Atheists are suffering serious damage. The tragedy is that D'Souza wouldn't stand a snowball's chance if they had a strong philosophical grounding.
For example, several of the New Atheists point to the Inquisition and Crusades and Witch Trials of early Christianity, the deadly Jihad waged in the name of Islam today, and so on—and D'Souza agrees this is a terrible toll that religion is responsible for. But he goes on to argue that when you actually look at the numbers, this responsibility is minuscule in comparison to the slaughter of over 100 million by the atheistic regimes of the 20th century. So he contends it is obvious that "Atheism, not religion, is responsible for the mass murders of history."
This point has devastated the New Atheists. They try to defuse it by arguing for some causal association between religion and those bloody regimes: if not explicitly by talking about the Catholicism in Hitler and Nazi Germany, then implicitly by gesturing to a "religious mindset" or some other vague influence of religion. But discussion of the Catholic connection to Hitler and Nazi Germany quickly turns into a back-and-forth of citations from competing historical experts. And while the dust is swirling over whether religion might be connected to that one part of 20th Century totalitarianism, D'Souza points to the explicitly godless Communist regimes. The New Atheists have been reduced to weakly objecting that the Crusades and Inquisition were done "in the name of" Christianity, while Communism and Nazism weren't done in the name of atheism—but given all the references that can be made to those regimes' explicit work to eradicate God, this approach is not convincing. The New Atheists are struggling because they aren't able to frame the issue properly.
What Atheism Isn't
First, consider that atheism is not itself an ideology; there is no such thing as an "atheist mindset" or an "atheist movement." Atheism per se hasn't inspired and doesn't lead to anything in particular because it is an effect—not a cause—and there are countless reasons for a person to not believe in God, ranging from vicious to innocent to noble. The newborn baby lacks a belief in God, as does the Postmodern Nihilist, the Communist, and the Objectivist—but each for entirely different reasons having dramatically different implications. So lumping all of these together under the "atheist" label as if that were a meaningful connection is profoundly confused. Yet this is exactly what the New Atheists do and encourage: they talk about how there are so many atheists out there, and advocate their banding together into an atheist community to seek fellowship, foster cultural change, build a political voice, and so on.[1] But what would a committed Communist and an Objectivist have in common—regarding what they do believe, why they believe it, how that leads them to live personally, the sort of social system they would strive for in government? Nothing. They are polar opposites in principle and practice, across the philosophical board.
The New Atheists can't rebuff D'Souza because he is actually following their own lead to associate them with brutal totalitarian regimes. And worse, that confusion makes it difficult to see the fundamental cause of the misery and bloodshed found across all of those failures of humanity—from the early Christian Crusades and Inquisition, through the 20th Century totalitarian regimes, up to the Islamic theocracies in the Middle East today. The important contrast is not atheism vs. religion, but rather rationality vs. irrationality.
The Wages of Irrationality
All of that bloodshed is a result of people rejecting reason as the way to do business in reality—which means rejecting our only means of peaceful and productive coexistence. Operating in the realm of reason, people are oriented to the facts, their means of dealing with one another is persuasion, and reality is the court of final appeal when there is disagreement. Take scientists, for example: necessarily focused on reason and reality, they resolve their scientific disputes with logic and by reference to facts. We don't find them fragmenting into sects and breaking out into violence over their disagreements. Indeed, just the opposite happens: the body of scientific knowledge converges over time as disagreements are sorted out and facts are acknowledged. Their successes and this convergence don't come from the use of guns and clubs, but from a commitment to reason and reality, facts and logic.
While it is easy to see brutes in totalitarian regimes reaching for a gun rather than peacefully persuading free minds, the connection to force may not be so obvious in the case of people of faith. Yet just as reason and freedom go together, so do their antagonists, faith and force. As Ayn Rand observed, "every period of history dominated by mysticism, was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny"—and she underscored this shared rejection of reason in identifying the two as species of the same basic animal: the brutes as "mystics of muscle," and the faithful as "mystics of spirit." To see how religious faith plays into the use of force, consider theologians in contrast to the scientists discussed above. Here we find ever-expanding divergence and fragmentation in their body of thought—just notice how religions and the denominations within them have multiplied through history. And we don't see believers resolving disagreements over their articles of faith by persuasion and reference to the facts of reality—whether it is Muslims vs. Christians, Catholics vs. Protestants, Baptists vs. Mormons, or one part of a congregation breaking away from another. This is because articles of faith aren't based on a grasp of the facts of reality, and so they can't be explained or defended by references to the facts of reality. Since people of faith can't resolve such differences using facts and rational persuasion, they are left with only one alternative: force.
Having it Both Ways
Besides trying to tar his opponents with the worst atrocities in history, D'Souza regularly tries to give Christianity credit for mankind's positive strides. For instance, he argues in an op-ed that "Christianity has illuminated the greatest achievements of the culture" such as the rise of science, human rights, equality for women and minorities, ending slavery, and so forth. That "when you examine history you find that all of these values came into the world because of Christianity." He contrasts Christianity and atheism, saying that these advances arrived in Christendom and by the hands of Christians—not atheists. And he uses this to score extra points in debate by asking his opponents what atheism has to offer humanity, other than the chance to undermine all that progress.
Once again, such a comparison is fundamentally confused. Recall that atheism is not itself an ideology and therefore doesn't lead people to do anything in particular—good or bad. So again we need to approach the issue in terms that will actually shed some light. The illuminating question to consider is: What does reason offer humanity over faith?
Here we see a striking contrast. Every discovery, every invention, every new idea that guided every step we have taken up from the poor, nasty, brutish, and short lives of those who came before has been made possible by one thing: thinking. Revelation never delivered a vaccine or explained the rainbow. Faith never designed a building or fed a baby. Submission to authority never discovered a better social organization or put a man on the moon. The power of this-worldly reason did.
Even the broadest strokes of history make this clear: Mankind stagnated for a thousand years through the Dark Ages while the Christian faith reigned supreme. Then what changed? Mankind started to believe that this world matters and that we are worthy and capable of living in it. The suffocating grip of faith and otherworldliness began to loosen as more people turned to reason and reality, and the West clawed its way from darkness into the Renaissance and Enlightenment. It took this-worldly thinking to discover the methods of science—not scripture and revelation, which had been present for millennia. It took free minds aimed at the task of living on earth to ignite the Industrial Revolution and the Information Revolution, and to deliver every bounty in the explosion of progress that followed—not prayer and intercession, which have been with us for all time.
Correlation isn't causation. Obviously, long-standing Christianity only accommodated the relatively recent changes that unleashed minds brought while its overwhelming authority eroded. We were delivered from the Christian Dark Ages despite Christianity, not because of it. Countless lives were made shorter and more miserable by its cruel stranglehold—and how much higher would we be flying now without its dead weight?
The New Atheists haven't been able to slam-dunk D'Souza because they lack the objective philosophical perspective necessary to penetrate to the core of these issues. In this case, their struggles reveal a failure to genuinely appreciate how religion is not itself the fundamental problem—irrationality is. Religion constitutes just one form of unreason, and the only thing that makes it particularly noteworthy and dangerous is that it has at its heart an explicit, committed, philosophical attack on reason: extolling faith as a virtue.
(Upcoming in the series: Science vs. Miracles, The Gap in Religious Thought, and Morality and Life.)
Notes:
Sometimes, simple ideas are often the best. For example, the invention known as the Easy PB&J Jar:
...How many times have reached the bottom of the jar only to be frustrated at not being able to get those last few bits? Well, too often for me.
The Easy PB&J Jar is a jar with two lids that allows you to access all of your peanut butter easily without having to resort to breaking open the jar. As you near the end on one side, simply flip the jar over to get the rest. The straight and smooth internal walls also ensure that no peanut butter is ever left behind a nook or cranny like existing jars.
As a physician, I wouldn't wish cancer on anyone. But now that Senator Ted Kennedy has been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor, I wonder which country with morally superior "universal health care" he'll go to for his treatment? Will it be Canada, the UK, or Cuba?
Read more...I frequent a blog called The Panda's Thumb, which keeps track of the dastardly intelligent design movement. Reading some recent entries on that blog led me to look up what some recognized cultural standard-bearers of atheism, such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, are actually saying.
So, if you're at all interested, read "The Atheism FAQ with Richard Dawkins" -- and weep. His answers to challenges to atheism are often clever, but they focus on non-essentials. And sometimes, they are downright pernicious. The most egregious, in my opinion (poor grammar and typos in original):
Q. Religious people claim they derive their morality from religion. Where from an atheist derive his morality?Dawkins' answer to the first question unmasks him as a "mystic of muscle." His answer to the second unmasks him as a thoroughgoing skeptic. Which I guess is saying the same thing. I don't suppose it occurred to Dawkins to answer to the first question: "The choice to live in reality"; or to the second: "The law of identity and the validity of induction."
A. . . . We derive our morality from the environment we live in, Talk shows, Novels, Newspaper editorials and of course by the guidance of parents. . . . An atheist derives his morality from the same source as a religious people do.
Q. In your book, you've said that God 'almost certainly' does not exist. Why are you leaving open the possibility?
A. Any scientific people will leave open that possibility, that they cannot disprove whatever unlikely the event might be. I would be the first person to accept God once evidence comes in favour of it.
Here's a modular shape-shifting robot that reassembles itself when kicked apart:
What could possibly go wrong with this technology?
I've not studied the views of Albert Einstein much, but I was surprised by this revelation of his views on God (via Dan Rohr):
Albert Einstein described belief in God as "childish superstition" and said Jews were not the chosen people, in a letter to be sold in London this week, an auctioneer said Tuesday. The father of relativity, whose previously known views on religion have been more ambivalent and fuelled much discussion, made the comments in response to a philosopher in 1954.That's definitely a refreshing blast of anti-religious air. Yet it doesn't go far enough. The Hebrew Bible not a collection of "collection of honourable, but still primitive legends." It is a collection of bloody, barbaric, and primitive legends. As a body of primitive literature, the Hebrew Bible is fascinating and often compelling -- but it's wholly unsuitable for moral instruction. The moral lesson of The Binding of Isaac, for example, is the absolute obligation of blind obedience to God's commands, even when those commands require morally abhorrent sacrifices of priceless treasures. Abraham must sacrifice his only beloved son Isaac to God simply because God demands it -- and he's rewarded by God because he's willing to do so without so much as a peep of protest. Such stories ought to be studied and enjoyed as historical curiosities, not as a foundation for modern life and morals. Read more...
As a Jew himself, Einstein said he had a great affinity with Jewish people but said they "have no different quality for me than all other people". "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this," he wrote in the letter written on January 3, 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, cited by The Guardian newspaper.
The German-language letter is being sold Thursday by Bloomsbury Auctions in Mayfair after being in a private collection for more than 50 years, said the auction house's managing director Rupert Powell. In it, the renowned scientist, who declined an invitation to become Israel's second president, rejected the idea that the Jews are God's chosen people. "For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions," he said. "And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people." And he added: "As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."
Previously the great scientist's comments on religion -- such as "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind" -- have been the subject of much debate, used notably to back up arguments in favour of faith. Powell said the letter being sold this week gave a clear reflection of Einstein's real thoughts on the subject. "He's fairly unequivocal as to what he's saying. There's no beating about the bush," he told AFP.
For some time now, NoodleFood has presumed an audience familiar with and/or in agreement with Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism in too many posts. I've grown unhappy with that, as that kind of blogging isn't consistent with my my goals for activism. So as of now, the focus of NoodleFood will shift somewhat. Except on rare occasion, posts will presume a general audience, as that's the audience I want to attract, interest, and persuade. Of course, I still expect the blog to be of interest to Objectivists. Also, not all posts will be philosophical: you'll get your usual doses of cool oddities and funny cat videos.
I want to publicly mention this change for a few reasons. (1) I want to publicly commit to it, so that my friends can gently chastise me if I slip back into my old ways. (2) Commenters might consider offering addenda or raising questions with the goal of making some point more clear or persuasive to a general audience. And (3) the kinds of exchanges in the comments might well change, as more people unfamiliar with Objectivism read and comment on posts. Be gentle and friendly with honest folks, as that's an opportunity to hone your argumentation skills.
So... you may now resume your regularly scheduled web surfing.
The t-shirt can be purchased here. (Image via Gizmodo.)
From the news: "The Vatican's chief astronomer says that believing in aliens does not contradict faith in God."
Presumably, the aliens aren't allowed to use birth control or have abortions either.
Update: The Onion's "American Voices" feature asks: "Sure, what's the harm in believing in two things with no physical evidence?"
As a point of contrast to yesterday's post, Three Cheers for Marrying Whoever You Damn Well Please!, consider the concrete meaning of forcibly preventing marriages for the sake of the supposed good of society: Indian village proud after double honor killing.
Five armed men burst into the small room and courtyard at dawn, just as 21-year-old, 22-week pregnant, Sunita was drying her face on a towel. They punched and kicked her stomach as she called out for her sleeping boyfriend "Jassa," 22-year-old Jasbir Singh, witnesses said. When he woke, both were dragged into waiting cars, driven away and strangled. Their bodies, half-stripped, were laid out on the dirt outside Sunita's father's house for all to see, a sign that the family's "honor" had been restored by her cold-blooded murder.This story reminds of me of Ayn Rand's notable comment on the essence of civilization: "Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men." Read more...
A week later, the village of Balla, just a couple of hours drive from India's capital New Delhi, stands united behind the act, proud, defiant almost to a man. Among the Jat caste of the conservative northern state of Haryana, it is taboo for a man and woman of the same village to marry. Although the couple were not related, they were seen in this deeply traditional society as brother and sister. "From society's point of view, this is a very good thing," said 62-year-old farmer Balwan Arya, sitting smoking a hookah in the shade of a tree in a square with other elders from the village council or panchayat. "We have removed the blot."
...
**DISCLAIMER**DISCLAIMER**DISCLAIMER**DISCLAIMER**
I'm going to talk a little politics now, but nothing I say should be taken as an endorsement, nor should approval of one isolated aspect or policy of a candidate be taken as agreement with or approval of anything else about him or her.
I've become a bit of political junkie this election year because of the historic demographics of the Democratic party candidates. It has been informative, usually painfully so.
I took a hit watching television this morning as Pat Buchannan and Katrina Vandenheuvel discussed the problem of the "elitist" label that Barack Obama has been fighting. The accusation of "elitism" has been political Kryptonite, so this is serious stuff.
Buchanan said Obama reeked of Harvard Law Review, or something to that effect (Obama is a past President of the Harvard Law Review). Vandenheuvel pointed out that President Bush went to Yale and Harvard Business School. Buchanan laughed, shook his head, and replied derisively, "But Bush was helped through Yale and Harvard!"
The clear implication being that the fact that President Bush didn't earn admission into an Ivy League school, while Obama had earned it, meant that his alma mater couldn't be used to tag Bush as an "elite" the same way it could be hurled as an accusation at Obama.
So down is officially up -- to demonstrate that someone has earned a value is to indict him for it.
Not that I haven't been aware all along that the "elitism" issue is perverted, in that it turns what should be an achievement into a slur. This morning's exchange was just so close to an explicit denunciation of the good for being the good that it blew my hair back.
First, via GVH, I found this interesting NY Times article on the history behind the Loving v. Virginia case that ultimately legalized interracial marriage. That case was decided just 41 years ago. I'm very grateful -- in a very personal way -- that race is no longer a factor in marriage in America. It's not a legal obstacle whatsoever, and not even much of a social obstacle. That's absolutely wonderful.
Second, the California Supreme Court has ruled that laws restricting marriage to heterosexuals violate the state's constitution. While I might not agree with the reasoning of the court, I do wholeheartedly support gay marriage. The essence of marriage is the total integration of two lives: sexually, legally, socially, financially, geographically, sexually, morally, etc. The fact that most marriages involve two people with contrasting genitalia is not of any grand significance. My marriage, for example, has far more in common with the relationship of a committed, rational lesbian couple than to the now-dissolved insane marriage between Brittney Spears and Kevin Federline.
Significantly, to recognize gay marriage as fundamentally similar to heterosexual marriage -- i.e. as a primary, enduring relationship fundamentally integrating two lives -- is not a lapse into subjectivism. That's because such integration is only possible with certain kinds and numbers of people.
Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain recently made a number of alarming statements about his approach to the "global warming" issue. In particular, on May 12, 2008 he stated that, "he would pursue mandatory U.S. curbs on greenhouse gas emissions if he wins the White House in November". This is not the first time that he has expressed such views. During the Republican candidates' debate of May 2007, he defended his policy along lines similar to Pascal's Wager:
Now, suppose that [California Governor Schwarzenneger] and I are wrong, and there's no such thing as climate change. And we adopt these green technologies, of which America and the innovative skills we have and the entrepreneurship and the free market, which is embodied by Senator Lieberman's and my cap-and-trade proposal, is enacted, and there's no such thing as climate change. Then all we've done is give our kids a cleaner world.Of course, McCain's argument omits the hundreds of billions of dollars of economic harm caused by implementing draconian policies that limit industry and commerce, as well as the countless harms done to individuals by prohibiting then from engaging in productive free enterprise.
But suppose we do nothing. Suppose we do nothing and we don't eliminate this $400 billion dependence we have on foreign oil. Some of that money goes to terrorist organizations and also contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. Then what kind of a world have we given our children?
I've received multiple e-mails in response to my recent letter to the editor in the May 11, 2008 New York Times advocating a free market in health insurance. I appreciate the fact that the correspondents all took the time to read my letter, see my affiliation with Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine (FIRM), search for the FIRM website, find my e-mail address, and then write me with their comments and questions.
The various correspondents posed a number of good questions about the nature of a free market in health insurance, as well as some more fundamental issues on individual rights and the proper role of government in health care. I've had several stimulating rounds of e-mail discussion with folks from around the country. And even though we didn't always agree on some important issues, all of the e-mails I received were polite and articulate, and I appreciated the many thoughtful remarks from all of the writers.
One correspondent recommended that I post my responses online so that other interested parties would have a place to read a more fully developed and explicit explanation of the ideas related to a free market in health insurance. I thought that was an excellent suggestion. Hence, I've paraphrased and collated an essentialized set of questions (and my subsequent responses) in the form of this brief FAQ.
(This FAQ has also been posted on the FIRM blog here.)
===========
Q1) In a free market for health insurance, should insurers be able to exclude someone based on a pre-existing condition?
Q2) Why should whether I live or die depend on whether an insurance company finds it too costly to pay for my care? Should my fate be determined by whether a corporation finds it profitable?
Q3) How would a free market guarantee that all Americans will have necessary health coverage?
Q4) What if someone has a bad disease through no fault of his own, can't afford the treatment, and no insurance company will cover him? Who will pay for his care?
Q5) Isn't the purpose of a government to promote the common welfare of all citizens?
Q6) Your position is very harsh and Darwinian. If you were dying of cancer and could not afford treatment, would you really say to yourself, "Oh well, this is my random bad luck, no one has an obligation to treat me and so I must die"?
Q7) Isn't it my social obligation to subsidize the health care of those who can't afford it?
Q8) I agree that health care is not a "right", but isn't it moral for the US government to raise taxes to improve the overall welfare of the nation? Universal health care (ideally administered through a free-market mechanism to the greatest extent possible) would be a good use of that power.
= = = = = = = = = =
Q1) In a free market for health insurance, should insurers be able to exclude someone based on a pre-existing condition?
A1) Yes. In a free market, insurers (like any other businesses or individuals) are entitled to set whatever terms they wish for the products they wish to sell. Similarly, customers can choose to accept those terms, decline them, or negotiate with them for some other mutually agreed-upon alternative.
It's also important to note that our current system is far from a free -- at best it's semi-free. Insurance companies are under numerous government constraints about what sorts of services they must/must not offer, who they can/cannot exclude, what sorts of prices they can charge, when they must accept customers, etc. For instance, some states require that a healthy 22-year old man must pay the same premium as a 60-year old man with multiple chronic health problems. Some states require that insurance companies that offer small group policies must accept every group that applies and must accept every member of the group regardless of lifestyle choice or health condition. Constraints such as these make it difficult for customers to purchase insurance in the first place. These constraints are the cause of our current problems and it is those constraints that I wish to see repealed. (For more details, please refer to "Moral Health Care Vs. 'Universal Health Care'" by Lin Zinser and myself.)
Q2) Why should whether I live or die depend on whether an insurance company finds it too costly to pay for my care? Should my fate be determined by whether a corporation finds it profitable?
A2) One should reverse that question. Should an insurance company be obliged to run at a loss? For example, there are many people who wish to force insurers to cover expensive treatments that are of minimal (if any) proven efficacy, such as bone marrow transplant in patients with late-stage breast cancer. If or when such laws are passed, insurance companies don't survive for long or else they pull out of local markets where such laws are in force, thus depriving all the other residents of that locality the possibility of purchasing insurance from that company. If an insurance company cannot be profitable, then they can't provide coverage for anyone.
More fundamentally, should an insurance company be obliged to pay for your care purely because you need it, regardless of the cost to them? The fact that you have a need does not create an automatic obligation on others to fulfill that need.
Q3) How would a free market guarantee that all Americans will have necessary health coverage?
A3) There's a premise in your question that I must disagree with - namely that it's the government's responsibility to guarantee health coverage for all Americans. It is not, any more than it's the proper role of the government to guarantee that every American has a job or a car. Health care is a need, but that's not the same thing as a right.
A right is a freedom of action that an individual possesses, such as the right to free speech. Rights impose no positive obligations on other people, merely the negative obligation to leave you alone. Rights are not automatic claims on the goods and services produced by others -- that is just state-sanctioned theft.
To further concretize the difference between a need and a right, consider an innocent child with a rare disease who will die unless he gets a bone marrow transplant from a matching donor. The only potential donor with the proper tissue match is someone who doesn't want to donate, for whatever reason (maybe he's scared of needles, maybe he's a Jehovah's Witness, maybe he's just an ornery old cuss). We'll also stipulate that the potential donor understands exactly what is at stake for the child, and that he correctly understands that donating bone marrow is a very safe procedure that would involve a few minutes of tolerable physical pain and a couple of hours of his time, but otherwise wouldn't impair his life afterwards. The fact that the child will die without that bone marrow does not mean that the child's family (or anyone else) has the right to strap that potential donor down and forcibly take a marrow sample from him against his will. The child's need does not constitute a right to that other man's bone marrow.
Q4) What if someone has a bad disease through no fault of his own, can't afford the treatment, and no insurance company will cover him? Who will pay for his care?
A4) The short answer is, "Anyone who wishes to do so."
If someone incurs an unfortunate random hardship (even though it is no fault of his own), it does not create an automatic obligation for anyone else to pay for it. Depending on the exact circumstances, I might be willing to voluntarily donate my own time/money to help him out. For example, in my capacity as a physician, I have personally waived my own professional fee more times than I can count out of voluntary charity for patients whom I've thought were worthy recipients. The same is true for nearly every other physician I know. And in general, Americans have been extraordinarily benevolent about voluntarily donating their time and money for innocent victims of natural disasters, disease, and man-made harms (such as 9-11 or the Oklahoma City bombings).
So if someone developed a bad disease that would cost him $100k, and either didn't get insurance or couldn't get insurance, then he essentially has to rely on the voluntary charity of others. His need (genuine as it may be), does not create a right to someone else's property or time.
This isn't limited to health care. The same would be true if an unfortunate homeowner didn't or couldn't purchase flood insurance, then his house was completely destroyed by a freak 100-year flood. His hardship does not constitute any sort of automatic claim on others' assets. Again, I (and many others) might be willing to be offer voluntary charity to help him out. But if no one is voluntarily willing to help him out, then he loses his house.
Furthermore, the very fact that such examples tug at the sympathies of normal decent Americans also means that those Americans will be forthcoming with voluntary charity. And I fully support giving to charities that are consistent with my values and priorities.
Q5) Isn't the purpose of a government to promote the common welfare of all citizens?
A5) No, the purpose of government is to protect individual rights - specifically to protect individuals from the predations of others who would use force to deprive men of their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This includes protecting honest men from external enemies who would wage war on us as well as internal criminals who would use force to steal, murder, commit rape, etc. Hence the purpose of a government is to create and enforce conditions where men and women can freely and voluntarily exchange ideas, goods, and services to the mutual benefit according to their best rational judgment, without fear that someone else will try to forcibly rob them of those benefits. Man's essential nature requires that he uses his reasoning mind to create the values necessary for sustaining his life. Hence, protecting his right to the free use of his mind (and the right to voluntarily trade with others for the products of their thought and effort free from compulsion) is the basic function of a government.
When a government ceases to be the protector of individual rights and instead becomes one of the chief violators, then it undermines the very reason for its existence. It's akin to a government claiming that "we need to protect the freedoms of Americans from enemies abroad", and then imposing a military draft on young Americans to fight in a war (and violating those draftees' freedom and rights in the process).
Q6) Your position is very harsh and Darwinian. If you were dying of cancer and could not afford treatment, would you really say to yourself, "Oh well, this is my random bad luck, no one has an obligation to treat me and so I must die"?
A6) Yes. My life is my own responsibility. Others may choose to voluntarily help me if am in need, but they should not be legally required to do so (i.e., they should not be forced by the government to help me against their will or punished by the government for failing to help me.)
If I needed $100,000 for a life-saving cancer treatment but couldn't afford it, I would of course do everything legal and moral to try to live. I might borrow money from friends and family, I might ask for charitable contributions, I might sign up for clinical trials of experimental drugs, etc. But I wouldn't hack into my neighbor's bank account and steal that money from his kids' college fund. Or steal $100 each from a thousand of my neighbors. Or ask the government to take it from my neighbors by force.
Similarly, if my next-door neighbor was the only possible matching bone marrow donor to cure my rare disease but he didn't want to donate a sample to save my life, I wouldn't strap him down and take it from him by force. If I had a brain tumor that required a delicate operation in order for me to live, and the only neurosurgeon with the necessary skill was unwilling to do the procedure, I wouldn't force him to perform the surgery at gunpoint (or have the government force him).
That's not being Darwinian -- that's just being moral. Of course, I would prefer to live rather than die of a terrible disease. But I wouldn't want to live if it costs me my integrity and my self-respect. A man can't "save" his life at the price of sacrificing his morality, since morality is the very means that a man survives as a man.
Q7) Isn't it my social obligation to subsidize the health care of those who can't afford it?
A7) No, you have no positive binding obligation to help others although of course you have the voluntary choice. Nor is this limited to health care -- it's an application of a more general principle. If I saw a child drowning in the ocean, in all likelihood I would try to save him if I thought I had a reasonable chance of success. And nearly everyone I know would feel similarly. But if a different passerby chose not to make the attempt for whatever reason, then that's his choice to make and one which I have to respect. He has the right to decide whether he wishes to try or not. Conversely, the drowning child cannot demand that a random passerby must help him as a matter of right -- only out of voluntary charity. If it turned out that a passerby was a strong swimmer but refused to help because he was a total jerk, then I might hold him up to public moral censure -- maybe he'd lose his friends, his job, and the respect of his peers. But the government should not send him to jail for failing to take a positive action that could have saved the child's life (assuming that he wasn't the cause of the child's drowning in the first place).
Just as a passerby should not (and currently does not) have a legally binding positive obligation to help a drowning child even if he is capable of doing so at no cost to himself, he should not be obligated by law to pay for my cancer treatment. There's a crucially important difference between him having the negative obligations not to steal from me or not to deprive me of freedom of speech (i.e., to respect my rights), and any purported positive obligations to pay for my health care or save me from an accident. Again, my right to free speech implies only a negative obligation on his part not to violate it -- it does not require a positive action on his part. On the other hand, any alleged entitlement rights such as a "right" to health care is essentially a demand by me for some forced positive action from others.
Q8) I agree that health care is not a "right", but isn't it moral for the US government to raise taxes to improve the overall welfare of the nation? Universal health care (ideally administered through a free-market mechanism to the greatest extent possible) would be a good use of that power.
A8) If we agree that there is no "right" to health care, then by what right does a government force one citizen to pay for the care of another citizen? That's what any system of "universal care" essentially amounts to. What you consider a moral use of government power is something I consider deeply immoral. And the experience of other nations shows that any attempted system of universal care ends up destroying the free market that makes quality health care possible.
At a practical level, if I needed major medical care and couldn't afford it, I'd much rather rely on a pure free market plus voluntary charity from my fellow Americans, than a British-style system of government "universal care".
Although critics of the free market regularly claim that it would lead to "people dying in the streets", this would not actually happen unless Americans were far more impoverished and callous than they are today. The free market is our best protection from that scenario. And if Americans ever became that impoverished and callous, then no system of government-run universal care would be sustainable or even possible.
On the other hand, the nationalized health systems routinely deny care to people who have theoretical "universal coverage". Those patients *do* end up dying because of the allegedly "compassionate" government system.
I'm Diana Hsieh, a philosopher specializing in practical ethics. I received my Ph.D in philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2009.
Paul Hsieh is a physician specializing in orthopedic and emergency radiology. He blogs about science, technology, and random humorous items at GeekPress. He's a co-founder of Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine (FIRM) and regularly writes for its blog, We Stand FIRM. He has published a slew of op-eds and essays on health care policy. You can e-mail Paul at paul@paulhsieh.com, and follow him on Twitter @PaulHsieh.
Greg Perkins is a software architect working in the R&D labs at Hewlett-Packard, Boise. His degree is in mathematics and computer science. Greg hosts The Objectivism Seminar. Aside from work and philosophy, he plays jazz saxophone professionally with groups such as The Sidemen and Onomatopoeia. You can e-mail Greg at greg@eCosmos.com, and follow him on Twitter @gregperk.
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