thickvixen: “There is no perfect system in this world. But your response is to not have the system at all.”

If a “system” is costly, useless, and kills innocent people, then usually not having the “system” at all is a good idea.

Of course you could make an argument that the premeditated slaughter of criminals is not useless, and that it has benefits that are worth the costs, and even worth murdering innocent people. But you certainly haven’t made that argument yet.

(Incidentally, you can put the kibosh right now on any of your stock responses about auto accidents or airplane crashes or whatever the hell it is you’ll go on about next. I assume that you’re old enough to understand the difference between accidental death and premeditated intentional killing.)

Whig: Jesus said “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?”. Nurturing one’s excellence or achieving great things is only useful if it helps us to enjoy the good life.

This is a frankly weird, bizarro-world inversion of Jesus’s clear meaning in Mark 8:36. The whole point of the passage is that a life spent in the pursuit of worldly fortunes such as pleasure, power, and money could not rightly be counted as “gain” or “profit” or “advantage” if it means “losing your soul.” The idea being that there are things more valuable than all of those things, having to do with the sort of a person you are. Nowhere does Jesus suggest that you should value being the right kind of person because it pays off in yet more sex, food, money, power, etc. down the road; nor could he reasonably do so, since he’s claimed that not even the whole world (which by definition would preclude getting any more) could compensate for the loss or corruption of your soul.

Of course, you could agree or disagree with Jesus on the matter. That’s up to you. But the decision to quote him to bolster a view that is precisely the opposite of the view expressed by the quoted passage, seems a bit strained.

If they were missionaries or weren’t anti-imperialist, would you believe that they ought to be harmed after being captured?

Ghertner: This is true. However, assuming the drug had worked as advertized and turned the entire population into peace-loving non-aggressors, on what grounds could people object that they had had their rights violated?

If you’re talking about the effects of Pax in the movie, it wasn’t advertized as something that would just stop people from committing rights-violations against each other. It was supposed to have pretty radical effects on people’s personalities and dispositions. (And in fact it did; just not the effects that the central planners expected.) But people have a right to have any personalities and dispositions that they want, and coercively controlling the minds of a whole population through drugs involves a massive and systematic regime of aggression against lots and lots of innocent people.

If you’re talking about some other hypothetical drug that somehow stopped people from ever violating anyone else’s rights, and had no other effects at all, then you might have some case for claiming that it wouldn’t be aggressive, in and of itself, to make people take it. Fine, but on the other hand, most of the people you force it on wouldn’t ever violate anyone’s rights in any serious way, so there is a question of proportionality. If the amount of illegitimate force being defended against through forcibly administering the drug is at or near 0, then the amount of force that you could legitimately use in forcing the person to take it is also at or near 0. Meaning that you effectively have no right to force most people to take it anyway.

Richard:

I can’t figure out why so much resources are going to protect one Supreme Court case ….

Because women’s lives are at stake, and this is one of the fronts we have to fight on.

Richard:

I live in New Jersey. We will have abortion rights whether or not Roe v. Wade is overturned, because we’re all pro-choice here, even our Republican governors.

I’m happy for you, really, but not all of us are nearly so fortunate. If Roe v. Wade is overturned tomorrow, then abortion will certainly be recriminalized, more or less immediately, in most or all of the states in the Southeast, the interior West, and a substantial swath of the Midwest. You might say, “Look, Mississippi only has one abortion clinic in the whole state today; does it make that much difference to a woman from Tupelo or Biloxi or Sunflower County whether she has to travel to Jackson, or go out of state, to get an abortion?” But the answer is that yes, it does. Not everyone has the privilege of living in a state where reproductive rights are safe, or even near one. And not all the women in the states where abortion would likely be recriminalized have the privilege of being able to take several days off to travel to New York or New Jersey or California in order to get surgery that is already expensive.

This is setting aside the further question of federal abortion laws. Depending on the legal reasoning given in a hypothetical reversal of Roe, a blanket ban may or may not be a likely outcome; but whether it is or not you can certainly expect the Republican President and Republican Congress rumbling to pass federal procedure bans and federal laws aimed at restricting women from traveling across state lines to get abortions.

So, yeah. It’s important.

Richard:

I can’t figure out why so much resources are going to protect one Supreme Court case, and so little to changing the cultural attitudes that lead to the case in the first place.

If you don’t think that enough cultural work is being done to change people’s attitudes about abortion then why not do something about it yourself instead of fussing about how people and organizations who are already very busy with other important and closely related work aren’t doing it for you? (For example: write a letter to the editor, volunteer to become a clinic escort, tell an anti-choice family member about how you volunteered to become a clinic escort and explain why, buy books or music or films that advance the pro-choice position, etc. etc. etc.)

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Ghertner: Aggression is a bad thing. Making people less aggressive, either through cultural/environmental influences or genetic influences is a good thing. Thus, were we to invent a chemical solution to aggression, it would be wise to release this upon the population at large.

That’s an interesting plan you’ve got there for curtailing aggression, but it has one minor flaw. Specifically, forcing drugs on innocent people against their will is a form of aggression.

Oops.

Ghertner: Perhaps they should have done more testing. But at what point do we conclude that a product has been thoroughly tested and is considered safe?

When someone freely decides that it’s worth the risk and chooses to take it.

One of the chief benefits of being a libertarian is that it makes a lot of things easier. Who needs a central plan for safety testing when people are free to make their own individual decisions about risks and rewards? Or, well, their own minds?

She shares responsibility in this child’s death. But she was acting in good faith in what she thought was the best interests of her child. I don’t see any crime in that.

I don’t see any justice in punishing the mother either, but what you’ve said so far here is surely not enough of a reason for the conclusion. Supposing that you, acting in good faith on what you think is the best information possible, take my treasured Ming vase (because you mistakenly believe that it was stolen from you). Does the fact that you were acting in good faith mean you don’t have to give it back?

Supposing that in the process of trying to forcibly “recover” the vase from me, you drop it and it shatters into a million pieces. Does the fact that you were acting in good faith mean that you don’t have to pay me compensation for the destruction of what was, in fact, my vase?

Supposing that I try to stop you from taking the vase and you break my leg in the process of trying to forcibly stop me from forcibly stopping you. Does the fact that you were acting in good faith mean that you don’t have to make restitution to me for breaking my leg in the process of taking and destroying what was, in fact, my vase, from my own property?

Broadly speaking, what does the fact that someone is acting in good faith have to do with anything? If it’s somebody else’s property you’re damaging or taking, why should good faith or acting on what you think is the best information have any mitigating effect on your guilt or what you owe for the damage?

An exegetical note off to the side:

Protagoras: Frege seems to have thought sentences with non-referring expressions are meaningless, ….

This is a common misunderstanding of Frege’s view, one that I suspect comes about from people reading Russell and Wittgenstein’s thoughts about propositional meaning and truth-valuability back into Frege, who did not share their conclusions. Wittgenstein and Russell held that any significant proposition has a truth value, but what Frege explicitly states in “Ãœber Sinn und Bedeutung” is statements with empty proper names express a thought but have no truth-value. Since Frege’s claim is that the sense of a statement is the thought expressed by it, and the referent of a statement is its truth-value, this means that he regards them as having a sense but no reference, just as (he thinks) the empty designator in them has a sense but no reference. Here’s the relevant passage:

“The thought, accordingly, cannot be the Bedeutung of the sentence, but must rather be considered as its sense. What is the position now with regard to the Bedeutung? Have we a right even to inquire about it? Is it possible that a sentence as a whole has only a sense, but no Bedeutung? At any rate, one might expect that such sentences occur, just as there are parts of sentences having sense but no Bedeutung. And sentences which contain proper names without Bedeutung will be of this kind. The sentence ‘Odysseus was set ashore at Ithaca while sound asleep’ obviously has a sense. But since it is doubtful whether the name ‘Odysseus’, occurring therein, has a Bedeutung, it is also doubtful whether the whole sentence does. Yet it is certain, nevertheless, that anyone who seriously took the sentence to be true or false would ascribe to the name ‘Odysseus’ a Bedeutung, not merely a sense; for it is of the Bedeutung of the name that the predicate is affirmed or denied. Whoever does not admit the name has a Bedeutung can neither apply no withhold the predicate. But in that case it would be superfluous to advance to the Bedeutung of the name; one could be satisfied with the sense, if one wanted to go no further than the thought. If it were a question only of the sense of the sentence, the thought, it would be needless to bother with the Bedeutung of a part of the sentence; only the sense, not the Bedeutung, of the part is relevant to the sense of the whole sentence. The thought remains the same whether ‘Odysseus’ has a Bedeutung or not.” (32-33)

Hope this helps.

H.B.: They had several booths set up celebrating this most important of anatomical objects. Well, until the last one which was about the horrors of sexual assualt.

Well, how dare they. Didn’t those crazy feminists know that the point of feminism is to make you feel comfortable and pleased with the world?

Tony: Hate to break it to Maureen and all her soul sisters, but powerful men are not interested in women who behave like men. They are interested in women. Feminine women. Women who make them feel like men, not geldings. Women they can protect. Women for whom they can open doors. Women who specifically need what men can and want to provide.

Please don’t presume to speak for the desires, interests, and beliefs of men you have never met. Some men aren’t dependent on overt rituals of vulnerability, dependence, and machismo to make them feel good about themselves. Some men don’t even think that feeling “like men” specifically is all that important to living a good life. I don’t know whether this is true of “powerful men” specifically, but I don’t have much reason to think that their desires, interests, and beliefs are any less diverse than those of the men that I do know. Do you?