I think that pretty much everything you say here is right-on. Quick point of information, though:

“In the last Presidential election, Chirac ran against Dominique de Villpin (sp), a far-right xenophobe, and the left was forced to vote for a conservative incumbent who took their support for granted.”

Dominique de Villepin is a political ally of Chirac’s, just recently elevated to the position of Prime Minister. The fascist revivalist that Chirac faced in the most recent Presidential election was Jean-Marie Le Pen, founder of the “Front National”. (France has multiparty presidential races with a single run-off round; what happened was that the Left vote was split between several unpopular candidates, so by a fluke Le Pen came in #2 in the first round and went to the one-on-one run-off with Chirac, where he was crushed by an alliance between Chirac and the Left voters, by a margin of 82%-18%.)

Hope this helps.

‘Much can be discovered about a man by examining his opponents, his rivals, his “enemies”.’

Please. I have little political sympathy for any incarnation of the Republican Party after about 1870, and I disagree with Ralph Luker about a lot of things, but this is just lazy demagoguery.

Locating people’s politics by the positions of their enemies won’t get you very far towards an intelligent understanding of politics. I hear that a few years back Adolf Hitler went to war against Josef Stalin, and that Stalin went to war against Hitler. Is the fact that Hitler was his enemy any credit to Stalin? Is the fact that Stalin was his enemy any credit to Hitler?

Sally: ‘“Queer” is a much broader category than “gay and lesbian”: it refers to any non-normative sexuality. So when you talk about queer history, you’re less guilty of imposing our categories onto the past.’

Well, no it doesn’t—not really. There are lots of forms of sexuality that are non-normative, in this society or in past societies, but which aren’t part of what “queer” is commonly accepted to mean: e.g. paedophilia, bestiality, incest, polyandry, liasons between black men and white women, etc. Maybe I’m jumping to conclusions here, but I doubt that Hugo’s class is going to cover all of these topics in any particular depth, and I also doubt that it should. (I know that I, for one, would be quietly puzzled if interracial relationships were being considered under the same heading of “queer” and furious if paedophilia, bestiality, incest, etc. were.)

Generally I think it’s pretty well understood that when people say “queer” it means something like “gay” in the broad sense or the ever-expanding alphabet soup (on a recent trip to a college campus I noticed that the “community” had now expanded to “LGBTIQ”) — that is sexualities that differ from the norm mainly in regard to the sex or the gender identity of the people involved. Of course there are problems with each of these ways of trying to say what you mean — sticking to words like “homosexual” and “heterosexual” and “sexual orientation” reifies categories that are actually very specific to our own times; using words like “gay” can do the same thing and also prioritizes the experience of gay men; using the alphabet soup is unwieldy, falls back on the same reified categories, and creates expectations of false universality; but I think “queer” is just as bad in creating the impression of false universality (although the sort of universality it suggests may be different) and also, frankly, hard to give any coherent definition to whatsoever that doesn’t just fall back on one or more of the terms that it’s supposedly trying to replace.

None of this is an argument against using any of these forms of speech, incidentally. I just don’t think that there’s any good one-size-fits-all solution to the linguistic problem and that we are better off keeping things simple while being critical of the terms we use than finding some “right” word to use.

Why is “raising” government “revenue” through taxation a good thing?

If it turned out that the government could solve all of its revenue woes by, say, picking out some wealthy minority (say, Christian televangelists), seizing all their assets and all the money in their bank accounts, and using the proceeds to pay down outstanding debts, would that make it a worthwhile policy?

Cleis: oy gevalt. Susan Haack ought to be there as well. And the failure to include Philippa Foot is frankly just flabbergasting. But I’m not sure whether that’s Honderich’s fault or Leiter’s fault for (apparently) assuming that no living philosophers were born before 1930. (Edmund Gettier’s still alive too, but he’s not the list that Leiter culled (!!))

logicnazi: The point here isn’t just about quality of work (although it is about that). If you’re just looking at citations there are plenty of philosophers that Cleis mentioned who could go toe-to-toe with almost anyone on the list—Foot, if she is missing, is the biggest example; Baier, Card, Anderson, Haack, etc. also ought to be there.

As it stands, I sincerely doubt that Honderich made any substantial effort to determine who is and is not “influential” by examining citations. As is usual when men draw up these sorts of lists, he seems to have made it up on the spot, e-mailed a few of his buddies for suggestions, and cobbled it together. There’s nothing intrinsically objectionable about carrying on in this way, but these kind of lists are always going to be biased towards what the author and his (or her) buddies know and care about. This isn’t weird or unusual, and it’s not weird or unusual (although it is unfortunate) for male philosophers, like most other men in our society, to think along boys-club lines. It seems pretty silly to rush in and insist that ad hoc Top 42 lists like these are really carefully objective reflections of the state of the discipline.

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.