Oscar: “By the way, someone with a decent scientific hypothesis or theory must, by definition, suggest some ways to test it, even if those ways are unavailable. here is no way to test intelligent design because there is literally no conceivable experiment…”

Like a lot of sweeping theses about proper methodology in science, it seems like this is projecting the methods that worked very well for general mechanics and chemistry onto a lot of sciences that don’t actually work that way. Aside from the obvious examples (mathematics, anthropology, etc.) from sciences outside the natural sciences, there are also plenty of perfectly respectable natural sciences that don’t depend on (and often don’t even allow for) controlled experiments: epidemiology, most of astronomy, and paleontology, for example. Of course, all of those sciences depend on empirical evidence, but the way that that evidence is gathered and the way that it enters into reasoning about what is true and what is false is quite different from the “testing predictions” model of scientific method. (If ID depended on nothing more than a sort of gestalt picture of the points of evidence and an inference to best explanation, it wouldn’t be any worse off on those grounds than any number of quite respectable theories in paleontology.)

From what I understand of them, ID theorists actually usually try to claim that the method of argument is a modus tollens against natural selection (there is some set of features had by living organisms which can be demonstrated to be “irreducibly complex” and therefore not explainable by natural selection). That happens to be a modus tollens whose minor premise is wildly undermotivated by the evidence, but that’s something you can and ought to demonstrate by doing evolutionary biology, not by throwing things at it from the philosopher’s armchair.

Well, there’s a lot to agree with here and some other things to disagree with. Certainly I’ve been reading and swapping links with Amp long enough that I found the post pretty frustrating too.

That said…

You wrote: “As for things like rape crisis lines, battered women’s shelters, and the like: I’m all for them! (Is there anyone who’s against them?) But why on earth should the federal government provide the funding for a battered women’s shelter in Uvalde, Texas? What’s the federal interest there?”

Well, I’m an anarchist, so I don’t think that the federal government has a legitimate interest in funding anything at all. But if you’re going through the list of things that it’s better or worse for the government to do, from a libertarian standpoint, most libertarians (and more or less all minarchists, I think) tend to take it that government funding for a criminal justice system is one of the most defensible forms of government funding you could have. But I don’t think that there’s any clear reason why government funding of battered women’s shelters (for example) is any more objectionable than government funding of jails; both could be thought of as spaces created as part of a criminal justice system (one to keep violent people in; the other to keep violent people out), and it’s not at all clear that jails are more successful as means of protecting battered women from their abusers than shelters are. So I guess what I’m wondering here is what the specific nature of your complaint is: (1) that it’s tax-funded anything (which would apply to jails and cops as well as shelters); (2) that it’s tax funding for services which are not appropriately provided by the government (which you might think applies to shelters but not to something else); or (3) that it’s federal tax funding for something which should instead be handled by the several states? If it’s (1) I agree but I think it’s very far down on my list of things to phase out (just as tax-funded homicide detectives are); if it’s (2) I don’t see what’s special about battered women’s shelters; and really if it’s (3) I don’t see what’s special about the federal as vs. the state governments. (There are lots of cases where federalizing law enforcement has had bad effects — e.g. in the efforts to beat up peaceful drug users — but I’m not sure what if any bad effects federalizing the grant-making for shelters or rape-crisis lines is supposed to have.)

“And is it so hard to believe that private charities can provide some of these services that Amp assumes the government must provide?”

Yeah, this is one of the most frustrating parts. Of course Amp knows perfectly well that shelters could be (and were) built from the ground-up without government support. It’s true that, given that government funding was out there, most shelters eventually ended up seeking that funding, but the pioneering decade of shelter-building in the 1970s was done almost entirely without government support, and it’s not clear that the effects of tax subsidies have been unequivocally positive, to say the least. (A lot of the first generation of women who built the shelters are pretty pissed off about the colonization of the movement by professional civil servants and nonprofit bureaucrats, the lack of credit for the feminist roots of the movement, and the precarious position that dependence on here-today-gone-tomorrow government grants has put many shelters in.)

Just before this, you said: ‘Life involves trade-offs. Women’s lives involve some particularly difficult trade-offs, regarding things like working, having children, taking time off from work, balancing work & home life, and on and on. I want those trade-offs and decisions to be weighed by individual women and their families. I don’t want government (especially the federal government) trying to impose “solutions” that seek to favor decision A over decision B.’

This is all true enough and right on, as far as it goes. But shouldn’t this be where libertarian feminism begins more than where it ends? Yeah, it’s true that we live in a world where a lot of women face hard trade-offs because they are women (or because their circumstances put them into some situation that’s peculiar to women). And it’s true that where this happens we need to trust individual women to make these decisions rather than depending on the (male-dominated) bureaucratic State to tell them what to do. That’s all true, and it’s important for some feminists to realize (especially liberal feminists, like the national leadership of NOW, who tend to have a lot more faith in the federal civil rights bureaucracy than the evidence really justifies). But of course part of the point of feminist diagnosis is to recognize that those hard trade-offs that women face are, themselves, not given by Nature; they are social facts, created by male supremacy, and they can be changed by concerted effort. (E.G., it’s true that women face a hard trade-off between keeping up with their career and spending time with their children. And given that they face this trade-off, we ought to trust individual women to make the decision that’s best for them. But we ought also to work so that women don’t have to face such a hard trade-off, and to make other options — like more flexible workplaces or, hey, getting Dad to pitch in at least as much — reasonably available. There’s nothing paternalistic or objectionable from libertarian principles about working for that; the important thing is just that we have to work for it by means of cultural change and voluntary alternatives, rather than through the coercive powers of the State.)

jj:

Want to know another ‘war’ that cannot be won, Mr Potts? The war against crime. Murders will always happen. Robberies will always occur. But we fight against them as much as we are able.

… and it’s precisely for that reason that those sorts of martial metaphors are as inappropriate for ordinary violent crime as they are for efforts to stop terrorism.

What you’re talking about is the system of institutions and policies that we have tried to develop to provide a system of criminal justice. Not a military machine. Comparing police work to war is a sure recipe for overbearing, careless, invasive police work that’s dangerous to “civilians” (that is, you and me).

Brad: “I mean really, who writes 40-page monologues into a novel?”

Well, Richard Wright and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, to pick a couple of examples off the top of my head.

There are plenty of reasons to criticize Rand’s writing but the mere existence of Galt’s Speech is not really one of them.

“Fourth, even if we waive the preceding, we confront another problem: if executions deter crime, why confine executions to murder? Why not execute all criminals and reduce crime en masse? That seems unjust, which suggests, in turn, that deterrence theory cannot be a free-standing rationale for the DP.”

This is an excellent point, and one that death penalty advocates mostly just drop completely (I guess because they’ve already convinced themselves that murderers do deserve death—something like “an eye for an eye” seems to be about the beginning and the end of the process—and proceed without thinking that any further argument on that point is needed).

I think there’s a similar point to be made against deterrance arguments—not only that you can deter more crimes than murder using execution, but there are more ways to deter murderers than execution. For example, you could torture and/or mutilate them without killing them. If killing people after many years of imprisonment and a lengthy appeals process could deter murderers on the margin it’s hard to imagine why some medieval torment or another wouldn’t do so more or less as well. But it’s pretty widely accepted that those kind of punishments are wrong, and even that they are wrong because they do something wrong to the criminal. But what grounds do we have for thinking that any execution, even the most “humane”, is treating a criminal any better? One could make arguments to that effect (some people would rather die than suffer certain kinds of torture), but the arguments have to be made, and have to be both general and unambiguous enough to justify the death penalty as a matter of policy. It seems to me that this—like the question of what further reasons make killing-for-deterrance acceptable in cases of murder but not for just any old crime—is something that deterrance advocates just blank out.

Great post.

1. “I was going to tear these people a new one for supporting a philosophy that has past its prime and its usefulness. . . . I’m just sick of feminists going around touting how much change they’re in favor of when all the changes they talk about have already occured [sic].”

When, exactly, do you think was feminism’s “prime,” and what “changes” are you thinking of that have “already occurred”?

1. “Andrew Dworkin ring a bell?”

Just out of curiosity, have you ever read anything by Andrea Dworkin? (I mean, actually read it, from beginning to end.)

Also, just out of curiosity, are you aware that Ice and Fire is a novel and the quotation you’ve pasted here is taken from a character in that novel?

Portraying quotes from characters in a novel as if they straightforwardly represented the views of the novelist is a bit disingenuous, don’t you think?

Congratulations! (That’s also about the third most adorable stock photo I’ve ever seen, by the way.)

As it happens, I’m a third-generation libertarian along my paternal line. That might seem like good anecdotal evidence for the inheritance theory. On the other hand, in the countervailing evidence column, my great-great-grandfather was a slaver. That might fly with the folks at the Von Mises Institute, but it won’t fly with me.

3) Democracy should be pervasive; not limited to some small area of life.

Our democracy is not pervasive. A lot of the most important things in your life are not set by government. They’re set by your employer: How much you’re paid, how you spend most of your day, whether you have a job, and so on. Do we get a say in this? Nope.

Why in the world would you want the government to set (1) how much you’re paid, (2) how you spend most of your day, (3) whether you have a job, etc.? I understand why it’s objectionable that your boss has so much power over your daily life, but isn’t putting the government in control of these things just exchanging one boss for another one?

One that you have no meaningful control over (see #1 and #2 above) and cannot even escape without fleeing the country?

1. I am not interested in whether statements are “bigoted” or “promote hate.” I am interested in whether they are true or false, and whether the arguments given for them are good arguments or bad arguments. You may think the former is more important than the latter, but I can’t see why.

2. Having a serious discussion of whether the statements made by radical feminists are true or false and whether their arguments are good or bad requires putting some effort into understanding what is being said and getting a grip on whether or not it’s representative of radical feminism as a whole. But it’s only worthwhile putting any particular time into that if there is a basic level of honesty from your conversation partner about the positions of the people under criticism. Haphazardly assembling a “horror file” list of quotes from works that you have not read, by authors that you know nothing in particular about, without citations to their works, including people who never were members of the radical feminist movement and also including quotes taken from characters in novels and quotes that were demonstrably not written by the person they are attributed to, does not reach that basic level of honesty. It is spreading lies—whether through intentional dishonesty or through incredible sloppiness (as is probably the case here). It is precisely as much a waste of time trying to argue with that as it would be trying to talk about Plato’s ethics with someone who pulls a bunch of quotes from Thrasymachus in the Republic to prove that Plato thinks that justice is the interest of the stronger, and adds some quotes from Ayn Rand about Plato and claims that Plato said them. If you intend to discuss radical feminist thought then you need to do the homework to find out what it actually is, just as you would with any other sort of political theory. Unless and until folks like you or the author here bother to do that, it’s a waste of time to do anything other than document a few of the specific lies that are being repeated, in the hopes that they won’t be repeated by others.

1. “You don’t HAVE an argument”, “There is nothing even remotely resembling an argument in what you have said,” etc. is useless bluster. I clearly do have an argument; that is, I gave general grounds (concerning, for example, the contexts in which courtesy is and is not obligatory) for drawing specific conclusions. You may disagree with my conclusions; you may think that my premises are undermotivated. Fine, but then your problem is you think the premises of my argument are themselves underargued, not that I haven’t got an argument. You’ve given no reasons above to suppose that the premises, if granted, do not support the conclusions. (If you have reasons for thinking my arguments are invalid or weak, and not merely unsound or uncogent, you should feel free to bring those reasons forward. In the meantime, your complaint is rather with the premises.)

2. The grounds for saying that the students were coerced has already been in evidence, both from myself and Roderick. You replied to the claim (but without claiming that the students weren’t being coerced; you just claimed that the school’s edicts shouldn’t be compared straightforwardly to the government’s laws) and were in turn replied to. At this point the question was dropped; you now come back and claim that there is “No answer” to the question of how the kids were coerced. Yes there is: the answer is that they are required to attend the damn thing and if they try to avoid it government officials will use force against them to make them attend or punish them for not doing so. You may think that this is not coercion; but if so you ought to give some reasons for that claim. You may think that it’s coercion but that its coerciveness doesn’t erase ordinary obligations for courtesy; but if so you ought to give some reasons for that claim. In neither case is it responsible to go around declaring that nobody has said anything to support the claim that they were being coerced into attending.

3. Nobody said that scholarly distinction is “required to speak at a school”; it is offered as one of the reasons that Blair’s appearance (which was a standard press conference for Blair to stump for his political campaign, using the school as a backdrop) is not plausibly connected to the students’ education. There are lots of reasons to bring in people of no particular scholarly distinction to speak at a school; there are even reasons to bring in people (such as Blair) who neither have any particular scholarly distinction nor any particular experience with what the students are learning about. But if you are bringing such people in then one wonders what connection their appearance does have with the students’ education. What were the students to learn by quietly attending to Blair’s press conference? What relation does it have to what the school curriculum aims to teach them? What are they losing out on by booing him? What would they have gained by not doing so? How does any of this justify the enforcement of mandatory attendance and standards of “decorum” on those who are thus forced to attend, as opposed to (say) making attendance purely voluntary or having the students spend the same amount of time watching Minister’s Questions on the television? All of these are important questions that need to be answered if you want to have a plausible case for claiming that a political press appearance of no particular direct connection to classroom work or curricular activities has an important connection to the students’ education. They are not answered above because you are too busy taking rhetorical swipes and unilaterally declaring “dialectical victory.” You may, of course, regard the conversation however you want to regard it, but you can hardly expect anyone else to care that you so regard it.