Comments Elsewhere

Schreiber: Libertarianism, which I generally support, isn’t justified by recourse to objective deontology (nothing is) and as a meta-ethical point, the functioning of all ethical systems are predicated on a hypothetical imperative. … But in the latter case, the first argument of Mackie’s Error Theory will apply and the position is untenable.

These are bold claims for which you have provided absolutely no support. I don’t know which argument of Mackie’s you’re referring to as the “first”; if you mean the Argument from Relativity (the first one he uses to attack the existence of objective values in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong) then the argument is not even remotely decisive. (So people disagree on ethics and it’s hard to resolve the dispute by introducing bits of evidence that one of the parties has not got. So what? You could offer the same worries about meta-ethics or philosophy generally that Mackie offers about normative ethics. If it doesn’t entail that there’s no objective fact of the matter as to whether or not error theory is true, then it doesn’t entail that there’s no objective fact of the matter as to whether a given normative ethical claim is true, either. Broadly speaking, if your argument depends on this kind of crude verificationism, you should probably give the argument up.) For discussion of the second claim, see Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness, in which she revisits (and rejects) her own earlier argument from “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives.” The first claim is also simply irrelevant, since the claim was merely that slavery is an evil in itself and not for its causal contribution to something else. That may be true under deontology but it’s also perfectly compatible with virtue ethics, some kinds of consequentialism, and many other theories about the nature of the Right and the Good. It’s not compatible with hedonism, but the fact that hedonism blocks you from viewing slavery as an evil in itself is one of the chief reasons that hedonism is false.

But to press my earlier point on real freedom: there is somethign that you know you will never do, the government suddenly bans it, is your freedom diminished?

Yes. Freedom is a term with modal weight; it has to support counterfactuals.

Kennedy: Yes. He’s quite right that many actively excuse rights violations in these other places and hold the U.S. to be a worse offender when it usually is not.

I certainly agree with you that there are people who do this, and that the examples that you give are good ones. But is this just a general beef on your part, or do you have specific examples in mind having to do with the killing of Tookie Williams, or even the death penalty in general? Because frankly, the only evidence that Greenwald seems to offer is that some people vocally objected to the killing of Williams but he personally hasn’t seen them objecting to executions in other countries where the death penalty is used more freely and against people who certainly didn’t do anything wrong. Which is frankly a ridiculous standard for concluding that someone is being dishonest or selective; there are lots of honest reasons that you might object to both A and B but only mention A at some particular time. (Maybe there are some Leftists in Europe, or some libertarians in America, whose outrage over Williams’ execution is dishonest; but the argument certainly hasn’t shown that.)

WhiskeyJuvenile: People post a lot of words about Kelo because:

a) we have a more realistic chance of dealing with it; b) we actually are arguing against an opposition, whereas nobody is defending the events in the Congo.

That’s fine. Maybe similar considerations to (a) and (b) explain some people’s decision to spend a lot of words on the killing of Tookie Williams without first having made sure that they denounced every murderous regime in the world that also deliberately kills prisoners?