Irfan: “there isn’t enough data to support or undermine claims about the deterrent effect of searches, but in that case, all things being equal, prudence would dictate using them in case there is one”

If there’s no persuasive evidence for or against the claim that an invasive government procedures have a deterrant effect on crime, wouldn’t presumptions of liberty suggest not using them?

If so, does prudence not dictate that we should hold the government to high standards of evidence before they can override presumptions of liberty, especially in movement from place to place?

There aren’t many things in this world that Leo Strauss is right about, but I think the following may be one of them: the alleged problem between the scientific worldview and ethical norms has less to do with science per se than it has to do with the philosophical victory of mechanistic over teleological accounts of nature in the language used to discuss scientific discoveries. It becomes much less difficult to square the idea of moral facts with your conception of science and the natural order if the language that you feel entitled to use in descriptions of the natural includes terms like “purpose” and “end” and “form of life”, than if you are methodologically committed to burning those kind of terms out of the language wherever you can find them. If there is a distinctively human form of life and virtues can be explained in terms of the ways of being and kinds of activity that are appropriate to that form of life, then morality becomes much easier to fit into something that you might call a naturalist worldview. (See, for example, Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, or more recently Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness.)

Of course, it’s probably no coincidence that the same people who revolutionized mechanics, chemistry, etc. in the early modern period were also the people leading the philosophical charge against teleology and in favor of mechanism. So the victory of mechanism over teleology probably has had some concrete historical pay-offs. But of course that’s not the same thing as being true, and anyway the fact that teleological language was once abused and as a result (in the context of a rather complex set of historical, political, and intellectual factors) science stagnated, does not mean that it would have similarly harmful consequences today.

Hey, look, it’s another male Leftist pissing all over other social justice movements in order to demand attention for his pet cause:

Political discourse in this nation centers on social issues such as abortion and gay marriage, and there is a real paucity of debate on matters that actually impact the daily lives of Americans, such as the stunning loss of manufacturing jobs.

It may very well be true that abortion has never actually impacted on Ephraim Harel’s daily life; but since in the real world over a million women have abortions every year, and about one in three American women will need an abortion by the time she reaches age 45 (and the women who need them are, incidentally, disproportionately working-class), it’s a pretty damn important issue for the daily lives of a lot of ordinary Americans. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this leaves not a few of us with the lingering impression that women’s daily lives just don’t matter very much to some male Leftists.

Harel’s perfectly right to remind the Left of the importance of labor organizing, to call for more aggressive unionism, and to question the AFL-CIO’s ongoing efforts to act as if they were running a PAC rather than a labor union. These are all things worth saying, and views worth promoting. But they are not worth saying or promoting at the expense of women’s struggle for control over their own bodies and their own lives. Goodbye to all that.