Comments Elsewhere

Interestingly enough, these kind of displays were a common element of stateless arbitration in medieval Iceland, as well. Here’s Jesse Byock, in Viking Age Iceland:

The absence of pitched battles does not mean that the island inhabitants eschewed all forms of militant show, only that they ritualized the actual use of force. Parties to a dispute that was moving toward resolution frequently assembled large numbers of armed baendr [freeholders]. Sometimes these groups confronted each other for days at assemblies and at other gatherings, such as when a successful party was trying to enforce a judgment at the home of the defendant (féránsdómr). Althought opposing sides often clashed briefly, and a few men might be killed, protracted battles were consistently avoided. It was not by chance that the parties showed restraint. Leaders really had few options if they hoped to retain the allegiance of a large following, since the baendr were not dependable supporters in a long or perilous confrontation. They had no tradition of obeying orders, maintaining discipline, or being absent from their farms for extended periods. The godhar, for their part, were seldom able to bear the burdens of campaigning. They lacked the resources necessary to feed, house, equip and pay followers for more than a brief period.

Rather than signalling the outbreak of warfare, a public display of armed support revealed that significant numbers of men had chosen sides and were prepared to participate in an honourable resolution. With chieftains and farmers publicly committed, a compromise resting on a collective agreement could be reached. (p. 125)

Dude. There’s no such thing as a “meme”. This is an idea that you’ve chosen to suggest. You are not an information-pattern replicator; you’re a human being. Take responsibility for the contents of your own mind!

Just out of curiosity, which of the following assertions and implications do you object to as “irrational”?

1. Men who claim to be antisexist should make a commitment to ending rape.
2. That is the only meaningful commitment to equality.
3. Men who claim to be antisexist should make a commitment to ending rape because that is the only meaningful commitment to equality.
4. It is astonishing that in all our worlds of feminism and antisexism we never talk seriously about ending rape. Ending it. Stopping it. No more. No more rape.
5. Perhaps in the back of our minds, we are holding on to its inevitability as the last preserve of the biological.
6. Perhaps we think that it is always going to exist no matter what we do.
7. All of our political actions are lies if we don’t make a commitment to ending the practice of rape.
8. This commitment has to be political.
9. It has to be serious.
10. It has to be systematic.
11. It has to be public.
12. It can’t be self-indulgent.

And, whichever of these you pick, what specific reason do you have for regarding it as irrational?

calamariachi: “I say Bah! to any article that quotes Andrea Dworkin as a source!”

For context, here’s the quote that I pulled from Dworkin’s speech, I Want A Twenty-Four Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape”: “I want to see this men’s movement make a commitment to ending rape because that is the only meaningful commitment to equality. It is astonishing that in all our worlds of feminism and antisexism we never talk seriously about ending rape. Ending it. Stopping it. No more. No more rape. In the back of our minds, are we holding on to its inevitability as the last preserve of the biological? Do we think that it is always going to exist no matter what we do? All of our political actions are lies if we don’t make a commitment to ending the practice of rape. This commitment has to be political. It has to be serious. It has to be systematic. It has to be public. It can’t be self-indulgent.”

Do you think that anything in the passage quoted is false or wrong? (If so, what?) Or do you just dislike the author?

Here’s one of the few canonical philosophical puzzles that I had learned about by the age of five. What’s the truth-value of the following statement?

(L) This statement (L) is false.

The problem, of course, is that if (L) is true then it’s false, and if (L) is false then it’s true. Thus, any theory of truth that assigns a truth-value to (L) is internally contradictory, since the theory will (inter alia) include the contradictory truth-ascription:

(TL) L is true if and only if L is false.

Since there are no true contradictions, a theory of truth must not assign any truth-value to (L) at all. But how do you doing it? If a statement hasn’t got a truth-value, then the usual take is that they are, in some respect, nonsense; that is, they fail to make an assertion — just as “Cat mat on the sat the” fails to make an assertion. The canonical approach to (L) in the 20th century has been to try to come up with some principled means of ruling (L) out of the language by means of setting up the right structure of rules beforehand (just as you can point to the preexisting rules of syntax to show that “Cat mat on the sat the” doesn’t amount to a complete sentence). The most famous attempt, and the inspiration of many of the subsequent attempts, has been Tarski’s attempt to sidestep the Liar Paradox by means of segmenting language into object-language and meta-language layers. The idea being that, if you do this assiduously, you can avoid self-referential paradoxes because self-reference won’t be possible in languages whose sentences can be ascribed truth-values; because they can only be ascribed truth-values within a meta-language that contains the names of the object language’s sentences and truth-predicates for those sentences. I have a lot of problems with this approach; a full explanation of them is something that I ought to spell out (indeed, have spelled out) elsewhere. But here’s a quick gloss of one of the reasons: Tarski and the people inspired by him started setting up ex ante rules to try to rule out self-referential sentences because it’s self-reference that makes the Liar Paradox paradoxical (and that makes for similar paradoxes in similar sentences; exercise for the reader: show how “If this sentence is true, then God exists” is both necessarily true and strictly entails the existence of God). But there’s an obvious and general problem for the method: there are self-referential sentences which are unparadoxical, and indeed self-referential sentences which are true. Here’s an example which may or may not cause trouble for Tarskian theories, depending on the details:

(E) This sentence (E) is in English.

(E) is truth-valuable; and in fact it is true. (If, on the other hand, it had said “This sentence is in French,” it would have been false.) Now, this may cause trouble for the Tarskian method and it may not, depending on the details of a particular account. (Sometimes people want to ban all self-referential sentences; sometimes they are more careful and claim that object languages might be able to name their own sentences but only so long as they don’t contain the truth-predicates for their own language.) But even if (E) is allowed, you haven’t solved the problem. There are plenty of self-referential truth-ascribing sentences that aren’t paradoxical, too. Here’s one:

(EM) Either this sentence (EM) is true, or this sentence (EM) is false.

Unlike (L), this causes no logical paradoxes. If you suppose that it’s false, that means that it turns out to be true — since the second disjunct, “this sentence (EM) is false” turns out to be true; meaning that it cannot be false. But it can be true, without contradiction. So it has to be true, if it has any truth-value at all. That shouldn’t be surprising; it’s an instance of the law of the excluded middle, and all instances of the law of the excluded middle are true.

Now, you might think that (EM)’s relationship to ordinary talk is attenuated enough, and the reasons for thinking it unparadoxical are technical enough, that it might be an acceptable loss if some other technical stuff that saves us from (L) happens to rule out (EM) too. I’d be inclined to agree, except that (EM) isn’t the only example I had up my sleeve, either. Here’s another. In the Prologue to the Travels, Marco Polo wrote,

We will set down things seen as seen, things heard as heard, so that our book may be an accurate record, free from any sort of fabrication. And all who read this book or hear it may do so with full confidence, because it contains nothing but the truth.

Let M be the conjunction of all the assertions that Marco Polo makes in his book. The book contains nothing but the truth if and only if M is true, but that the book contains nothing but the truth is one of the many assertions in the book, so “M is true” is one of the conjuncts of M. Thus:

(M) This conjunction (M) is true, and Marco Polo traveled the Silk Road to Cathay, and served in the court of the Great Khan, and observed the barbarous customs of lesser Armenia, and … and … and ….

But it’s either true or false that Marco Polo’s book contains nothing but the truth; that assertion is a standard bit of understood language (passages just like it are a near-universal feature of traveler’s tales, or other extraordinary stories where the author feels the need to reassure you that she’s not making things up). If your theory of language throws it out as nonsense, then your “theory of language” needs to be thrown out, on the grounds that it’s not semantically serious. (Whatever it’s a theory of may be interesting, but it’s something other than language as it actually exists.)

Now, like Polo, I may have been fudging just a bit in what I said. I suggested that M isn’t paradoxical; I don’t think it is, but there is a way to make it seem paradoxical. Lots of readers have doubted that Polo was telling the truth; some of them, for example, were unimpressed by the evidence that he had ever served in the court of the Great Khan; others weren’t so sure about the tales of dog-headed men or giant birds that consumed elephants. Whatever the case, they believed that Marco Polo made at least two false assertions in his book: (1) the claim about his journeys that they doubted, and (2) the claim that his book contained nothing but the truth. Call these the normal skeptics. I’m sure there were also a few readers (however credulous they would have to have been), who believed that the Travels really did contain nothing but the truth; that is, that there were no false assertions in the book, including the assertion that the book contained no false assertions. Call these the normal believers. But now imagine a third kind of reader, a perverse skeptic — a philosopher, of course — who noticed that you could gloss the contents of the book as M, and who decided that she believed everything that Polo said in the book about his journeys, from the customs of lesser Armenia to the domains of the Great Khan to the giant birds. She believes everything in the book, except … there is one assertion that she thinks is false — that is, (1) the assertion that everything in the book is true, and nothing else.

There are a couple of different ways that you could approach the difficulty. One way is to point out that the perverse skeptic really is being perverse. That’s just not how you can sensibly read the book. Either you think that nothing in the book is false, or you think that at least two things are; the assurance of truthfulness just can’t be a candidate for falseness until something else has been shown false. But if you list the truth-conditions of M, then “M is true” is one among them, and it’s hard to see how you could stop the perverse skeptic from going down the list and picking that one as the only one to be false. Certainly Polo doesn’t say “The rest of the book besides this sentence contains nothing but the truth.” And given that he did say what he did, I’d be hard put to say that “this book contains nothing but the truth” isn’t one of the untruths denied by the sentence, if something else in the book is false.

Another way to approach it is this: you can imagine an argument between the normal skeptic and the normal believer; whether or not one ever managed to convince the other in the end, you can in principle identify the sorts of reasons that they might offer to try to determine whether Polo really did tell the truth about the birds, or about the Khan, or…, and you can say what things would be like if one or the other is true. But what kind of argument could the normal believer and the perverse skeptic have? How would one convince the other? Or, to take it beyond the merely psychological point to the epistemological point, what kind of reasons could the normal believer possibly give to the perverse skeptic to give up the belief that “this book contains nothing but the truth” is false? (She can’t point to all the true statements about his journey; the perverse skeptic already believes in those.) Or, to take it beyond the epistemological point to the ontological point: what sort of truth-makers could even in principle determine whether the normal believer or the perverse skeptic is in the right?

So there is a problem with M, to be sure. But the problem is not the same as the problem posed by L: there’s no logical contradiction involved, so its self-referentiality sets off no logical explosions. And the solution can’t be the same either: the radical move of abandoning the sentence as meaningless works with (L), where there’s just no right way to take it, but it doesn’t help us out with (M), where there obviously is a right way to take it (i.e., as the normal readers take it, and not as the perverse reader takes it).

So there has to be some right way to go about ascribing a truth-value to (M) (and also (E)). Whatever it is, it may very well also explain how we can ascribe a truth-value to (EM). But it certainly cannot also mean that we try to ascribe a truth-value to (L). What is it? Is there some kind of principled and motivated general rule that we can add to our logical grammar, so as to get M and E and maybe EM but no L? If so, what in the world would it be? If not, then what do we do?

(I have my own answers; for the details, you can look up “Sentences That Can’t Be Said” in the upcoming issue of Southwest Philosophy Review. Or contact me if you’re interested enough to want a copy of the essay. But I want to pose the puzzle and see what y’all think about it as it stands.)

Update 2005-12-08: I fixed a minor error in phrasing. Thanks to Blar for pointing it out in comments.

Here’s another stab and replying through the comment box; let’s see if it works this time.

The best place for you to go for a reply is Chapter 4, section 2 of Thompson’s essay (pp. 33ff), in which he discusses the irreducibility of natural-historical categoricals to other more familiar kinds of categoricals. I’ve tried to give some glosses of the reasons, and I’ll try to give some more, but of course he has more space and more talent than I do, and it was his idea to begin with. But here’s a few of the reasons he suggests to think that your analysis of natural-history categoricals won’t actually pan out.

1. Determining what counts as “intervention.” First, the attempt to finesse problems by attaching a qualification of “without (serious) human interference” (either inside or outside the scope of the quantifier — I’m not sure which you meant, but I’m not sure it matters, either). You’re right that I doubt whether “interference” can be cashed out in terms that are independent of the sort of natural life-cycle categoricals that you’re trying to use the notion of “interference” to explain. Thus Thompson: “[T]he question what counts as [‘intervention’] is surely to be answered, in any given case by appeal to the system of natural historical judgments with the relevant kind as subject. And so we cannot simply take such a category for granted and then employ it in an account of our form of thinking. —If the mother bobcat leaves her young alone, they will wither and rot; if she nurses them they will develop thus and so. In whichcase, though, do we find ‘intervention’, and in which rather ‘what happens, ceteris paribus’? No one will insist that the mother’s nursing be viewed as the intervention of something alien, from without, into an otherwise inviolate cub-system set to evolve in its own direction. But to deny it is just a more stilted way of expressing the thought that bobcats are not to be compared with caterpillars—they do not strike out alone and set themselves straightaway to munching. No, ‘the mother nurses them for several weeks’; I heard about it on a nature documentary.”

You might object that my quotation here isn’t responsive to your condition, which depends on human intervention specifically (so bobcat intervention might not cause problems). But there are certainly cases in which serious human intervention (if “intervention” means anything other than the sense that transparently depends on the aristotelian categoricals themselves) is precisely what makes aristotelian categoricals true. For example, there are aristotelian categoricals that are true of humans: for example, humans master language at an early age, but this would hardly be so if not for massive efforts on the part of other human beings towards babies and young children (as both the case of feral children, and also the fact that the overwhelming majority of babies would simply die if abandoned, demonstrate). You could try to change it to an “alien species” criterion instead of referring to humans particularly, but there are also aristotelian categoricals that are true of domesticated plants and animals; fig trees reproduce by grafting (which is somethign we do), wheat grows in such-and-such a way and ripens in the fall (thanks to tilled soil), domestic cats like to be touched by humans (but feral cats don’t), etc. (And the same could be said of any symbiotic pair of species you cared to pick; for what it’s worth, I think you’re right that “rats have fleas” is true as an aristotelian categorical — that’s part of the reason rats are such loathsome creatures! But that’s because fleas are a permanent and salient feature of the rat’s distinctive form of life, not because some percentage of rats do or don’t have fleas.)

I have some other worries about this criterion, but they’re mostly more trifling, so let’s move on to…

2. Semantic problems with the statistical quantifier. One of the first problems with an attempt at a statistical reading of the quantifier, even with the sort of qualifications you’ve suggested, is that any particular value you pick for the statistical level needed to satisfy the quantified formula is likely to be wrong in some cases. Examples (1)-(5) might plausibly be thought to imply that most, or the overwhelming majority of domestic cats, coyotes, humans, male and female emperor penguins, etc. etc. But that’s not true of all true aristotelian categoricals. For example, the mayfly breeds shortly before dying. I know this is true; I saw it in a nature documentary. However, as a matter of statistical fact, most mayflies die long before breeding at all. (Similarly leatherback sea turtles, to take a nearer cousin of ours.) You could try to patch this up by adding the qualification, “most S’s that reach the appropriate stage of their life exhibit trait T,” but of course this obviously does nothing more than relocate the problem to “appropriate stage of their life.” (And of course you cannot define it as “the stage in their life at which the overwhelming majority of them exhibit trait T,” since that is as tightly circular an analysis as you could hope for.)

3. Logical problems with the statistical quantifier. There are also some straightforward, if technical, logical reasons not to read “The cat has four legs” as “Most cats,” “The overwhelming majority of cats have four legs (… when such-and-such defeaters aren’t operative …).” As Thompson points out, aristotelian categoricals support inferences that statistical generalizations don’t; in this respect they are more like universal than statistical generalizations. For example, just as “All Greeks are European” and “All Greeks are mortal” jointy entail “All Greeks are both European and mortal,” so also “The domestic cat has four legs” and “The domestic cat has a tail” jointly entail “The domestic cat has both four legs and a tail.” But if you tried to do the same thing with a statistical generalization you would be committing a fallacy; “most Americans are white” and “most Americans are female” don’t jointly entail “most Americans are both white and female.” (The same is true for “overwhelming majority;” due to the size of the majorities that are usually required to be “overwhelming,” concrete examples might take several conjunctions before they fail to preserve overwhelmingness, but the important thing is that they can fail to preserve it eventually. Whereas with universal generalizations and aristotelian categoricals you can preserve the same level of generality no matter how high you stack the conjunctions.)

My previous guest post on the argument from marginal cases got a number of provocative comments that I’d like to reply to; but I’m having some baffling and frustrating trouble with the comment form. So until I’ve gotten that sorted out, I’ll use this space to expand on one of the points that I wanted to make anyway: the use that my argument makes of Michael Thompson’s notion of “aristotelian categoricals,” such as “The domestic cat has four legs and a soft coat of fur” or “Humans walk on two legs” or (what’s important for the argument) “Humans are rational creatures.”

Here’s an attempted gloss of the argument that may express things more clearly than I did at first. I used Thompson’s notion to argue that appeals to species normality can do more than ethical vegetarians (such as James Rachels) seem to think that they can do, since they seem to take the species normality argument to amount to nothing more than an arbitrary appeal to the pure Cambridge relation of being a member of the same taxon as other members who are rational. Of course that has precious little ethical bearing by itself, but what I suggested is that there’s a much more charitable reading of the species-normality appeal on offer, in light of Thompson’s aristotelian categoricals. It’s not that “Humans are rational creatures” asserts that all humans are rational (as might have been said before “marginal cases” were introduced as a counterexample), or that it asserts “many (most) humans are rational creatures” (as Rachels and others seem to have misinterpreted it). Rather, “humans are rational creatures” asserts a teleological fact, about the form of life that is proper to creatures of the human kind, to the effect that each individual human is supposed to be able to exercise certain forms of rationality just as we are supposed to have two legs and cats are supposed to have four. I suggested that this makes an important difference, and the difference that it makes might help (1) explain the special moral standing that anti-vegetarians attribute to individual “marginal case” humans but not to individual normal animals, and (2) undermine Rachels’ and others’ attempt to offer hypothetical animals with freak intelligence as a counterexample. For the details, see the post.

Anyway, this brings me to a couple of comments by Alex. First:

Firstly, why does the fact that the paradigm cases of an object-type have a certain property commit us to saying that all objects of that type have that property? (e.g because paradigmatic humans are morally relevant, all humans are morally relevant) – won’t this commit you to (for example) the idea that all humans have the property of ‘having two arms’ because paradigmatic humans do?

The best response here is just a clarification of the argument. That you shouldn’t butcher and eat infants, or the severely mentally retarded, or the comatose, is one of the unargued premises of all the arguments, shared between by imaginary interlocutors. I don’t think it needs argument; it’s one of the background conditions of having a reasonable theory of ethics that you believe this, not something that a theory of ethics should have to convince you of.

What does need argument is the claim that there’s a difference between “marginal case” humans and normal animals that would explain extending that moral standing to the humans while denying it to the animals. The argument for that isn’t based on a general principle that “Paradigmatic humans have P” entails “All humans have P.” (I freely concede that for any reasonable candidate for the morally relevant sort of rationality, there will be many humans in abnormal or transitory circumstances who don’t have it.) The inference that I do want to endorse is that if “the adult human has P” is true as an aristotelian categorical, then “all humans have a natural capacity for P” is true as a universal generalization (for some important sense of the phrase “natural capacity”). Not all humans have two arms, but all humans do have the natural capacity (in some sense) for having two arms; that’s why armlessness is a tragedy for you but not for a trout, and that’s why a human with the intelligence of a cow is thought of as having a profound disability, but a cow with the intelligence of a cow is not: because the one is a case of having a rational faculty that’s damaged (perhaps irreparably), while the other is a case of not having any rational faculty at all.

Of course, at best this only explains more fully what the appeal to aristotelian categoricals and teleological talk about the human form of life is supposed to do. Which brings us to Alex’s second remark:

But the notion of “aristotelian categoricals”/”telos” conflicts wildly with a modern scientific worldview, and we can hardly justify redeeming it because it achieves some cuddly ethical conclusions. (Second key question) Don’t you have a give an independent reason to believe in these categoricals first, and then you may be entitled to refer to them to establish conclusions elsewhere.

… to which there are a couple of things to say.

First, I didn’t intend my post to provide compelling reasons to reject the ethical vegetarian position (indeed, I accept a form of it, so a fortiori I don’t think there are compelling reasons to reject all forms of it). But I do think that the arguments in favor of the position aren’t as good as they could be, and that the devotion that nearly all ethical vegetarians show to the argument from marginal cases is misguided. One of my reasons for thinking that is that I think there are alternatives on offer that start from philosophical premises that most ethical vegetarians simply haven’t (yet) demonstrated an understanding of. Maybe those premises are wrong (I don’t think they are, but I don’t think they entail the anti-vegetarian conclusion, either), but ethical vegetarians will have to recognize the premises and give reasons to doubt them, or to doubt the inference drawn from them, before any progress will have been made. A full explanation and defense of the independent reasons for Thompson’s claims is better found in Thompson’s essay (there’s also a good discussion in Philippa Foot’s book Natural Goodness), and was in any case beyond the scope of the post.

Second, though, I do hope to use the rest of this post to take up the subject anew, and offer at least a sketch for the defense of Thompson’s claims about “aristotelian categoricals” and about the sort of teleological talk that go along with them. Partly because I think that something like Thompson’s picture is necessary for any kind of reasonable account of the nature of goodness (and thus for the foundations of any reasonable ethical theory). But the work that aristotelian categoricals will do for you in ethical theory is just a side benefit, not the primary reason for accepting them into our philosophical picture. The primary reason is that statements such as these:

1. The domestic cat has four legs and a soft coat of fur.

2. Coyotes hunt small game.

3. During the mating season, the male emperor penguin warms the egg while the female returns to the sea to feed.

4. Humans are rational animals.

5. Humans are the only known animals that use language, but not the only animals that use tools.

… are all both meaningful and true, and commonplace bits of what has sometimes been called “natural history.” But it’s hard — indeed, I think, impossible — to give a good account of what they truly say by squeezing them into any the familiar set of logical quantifiers, whether existential, universal, or statistical. A good analysis of (1)-(5) needs to do at least two things: (i) it needs to be materially adequate (i.e., it needs to provide a gloss that’s true when they are true and false when they are false); and (ii) it needs to be semantically serious (i.e., it needs to provide a gloss of the statements, not some other statements that are considered easier to deal with).

But if you interpret (1) to mean “all domestic cats have four legs and a soft coat of fur,” then your interpretation is not even materially adequate; after all, that’s not true (just ask poor Tibbles, who has been shaved and maimed in a tragic accident). If you interpret it as “some domestic cats,” “many domestic cats,” “most domestic cats,” or even “the overwhelming majority of domestic cats have four legs and a soft coat of fur,” then that will be something true, but it won’t be semantically serious. It doesn’t capture all of what is meant by the categorical statement, and you can see this by considering some parallel cases: some cats are blind, many cats are tabbies, either most cats are male or most cats are female — I don’t know which — and the overwhelming majority of cats are vaccinated against common diseases. But “The domestic cat is blind,” “the domestic cat is a tabby,” “the domestic cat is male,” “the domestic cat is female,” “the domestic cat is vaccinated against common diseases” are all quite obviously false. Material adequacy breaks down in the parallel cases because semantic seriousness wasn’t maintained in the original case.

So how can we understand categoricals like (1)-(5)? Well, you could decide that we can’t, and toss them out as not precise enough for the uses of a logical or scentific language. That, though, would seem to me to be a gross error about the nature of logic and its relation to everyday language, of the sort exposed by Wittgenstein when he said:

F. P. Ramsey once emphasized in conversation with me that logic was a ‘normative science’. I do not know exactly what he had in mind, but it was doubtless closely related to what only dawned on me later: namely, that in philosophy we often compare the use of words with games and calculi which have fixed rules, but cannot say that someone who is using language must be playing such a game. —But if you say that our languages only approximate to such calculi you are standing on the very brink of a misunderstanding. For then it may look as if what we were talking about were an ideal language. As if our logic were, so to speak, a logic for a vacuum. —Whereas logic does not treat of language—or of thought—in the sense in which a natural science treats of a natural phenomenon, and the most that can be said is that we construct ideal languages. But here the word “ideal” is liable to mislead, for it sounds as if these languages were better, more perfect, than our everyday language; and as if it took the logician to shew people at last what a proper sentence looked like. (Philosophical Investigations, § 81)

If we take seriously our responsibility to get everyday language right, rather than discarding it in favor of the will-o’-the-wisp of an “ideal” language, what sorts of understandings might be on offer? Well, Thompson’s suggestion is that we can understand the sorts of natural-historical statements such as (1)-(5) by reference to the role that those traits play in the natural life cycle of that kind of organism, that is, to facts about the form of life that that sort of creature enjoys and the way that that life is supposed to go. We say that the domestic cat has four legs and a soft coat of fur because that’s part of the way that domestic cats live under normal circumstances; having four legs is how they walk and having a soft coat of fur is how they stay warm. There are domestic cats out there that have two or three legs, or are bald; but that is something abnormal about them, due to abnormal circumstances (whether hereditary, or congenital, or acquired in the course of their life). In this case, it’s something that would generally be considered a defect, something wrong with the poor creature; but you can imagine cases (cats that can talk, or cats that can leap four stories) where the extraordinary trait would be preternatural, or better than cats are expected, in the normal course of things, to have.

What’s important is to see how these terms — “natural,” “form of life,” “supposed to go,” “normal,” “abnormal,” etc. — involve us in teleological talk. The fact that conditions are normal or abnormal, that the natural course of events is disrupted or allowed to proceed, are involved with teleological notions, notions of the natural ends that certain sorts of creatures have and the functions that their various distinctive traits serve in realizing those ends. And it’s not immediately obvious whether there is any way that this kind of teleological talk could be reduced to non-teleological talk. (It’s certainly not merely statistical: if all the cats in the world lost their hair through a mysterious virus, that wouldn’t make “domestic cats have a soft coat of fur,” or make baldness normal for the domestic cat. It would mean only that for the time being all cats are abnormal, due to abnormal conditions. Nor will appeals to evolutionary history do, since making sense of evolutionary history already requires you to talk about terms such as species and life-cycle functions such as eating, keeping warm, reproducing, etc., all of which involve you in teleological talk about the roles that each activity serves in the organism’s form of life. And, to ascend up a level of abstraction, if “fitness” isn’t a teleological notion, then what in the world is?)

That brings me to the last of the objections: isn’t Aristotelian teleology just the sort of thing that was rightly expelled from proper natural science in the 16th century? I don’t think, actually, that teleological talk does conflict with a modern scientific worldview — if “a modern scientific worldview” means the worldview presupposed by actual working science. I do recognize that it conflicts with any number of explicit philosophies of science, from early modern mechanism to high logical positivism to the modern day; but, well, so what? There’s good reason to think that it conflicts with them not because teleological language is, in and of itself, anti-scientific, but because the expulsion of teleological language accompanied the remarkable success of two specific branches of science — mechanics and chemistry — that for the past five centuries scientists and philosophers have repeatedly tried to “reform” all the special sciences by imposing standards of language specific to mechanics and chemistry on them. But there’s precious little reason to think the methods or forms of language appropriate to mechanics and chemistry are also what will work best for biology, geology, ecology, paleontology, epidemiology, metereology, tidology, psychology, economics, sociology, anthropology, etc. etc. etc. In fact, as I think Thompson convincingly shows, these methodological constraints are distinctly inappropriate for biology (and “natural history” broadly), because teleological talk about life cycles and natural functions is both irreducible to non-teleological terms, and essential to understanding commonplace biological statements about species, their traits, their lives, the organization of their bodies and the operation of their organs or tissues, and indeed the foundational concept of “life” itself.

Of course, I’ve only sketched out the arguments here, and referred to further discussions. I don’t expect this to be a knock-down argument in favor of aristotelian categoricals and their employment in inferring teleological facts. But if you think that you’ve got a way to reduce them to terms without teleological import, or to understand the categoricals without mentioning teleological facts at all, or to do biology while dispensing with both the categoricals and the teleology, well, try me.

Let’s imagine that, in a democratic society, they hold a referendum on the question of whether non-libertarians should have the right to hunt libertarians like animals. 95% of the population votes that yes, they should. Now they get the rifle and the hounds and come after you.

Questions: (1) is this law “more legitimate” than a law for hunting-libertarians-like-animals that was passed by a tyrant? (2) When the hunters pound on your door, do you have an obligation to “work through the system rather than outside it” to change the law, or do you have the right to defy it by picking up a gun and defending yourself as best you can?

“I believe in facing the consequences of your actions no matter what they are. You dont want to die? Dont kill people.”

Of course precisely the same argumentative maneuver could be used to defend any kind of tyrannical law whatsoever. For example: “You don’t want to be sent to the gulag? Don’t publish poetry critical of Comrade Stalin.”

You could say “But hey, people have a human right to publish poetry critical government officials. They don’t have a human right to kill other people. So you should have to face whatever consequences the government chooses to impose for the murder, but not for the poetry.” Well, then the issue isn’t The Law; it’s that you think it’s O.K. to punish murderers by killing them, independently of what the law is. You may or may not think that it’s the best policy, or you may even be unsure about it, but you clearly think it’s morally permissible for the government to do it. Otherwise you wouldn’t be acting as if the contents of the law proved anything at all.

As for abortion clinic bombers, it is the fact of the matter, not the motivation that matters. If abortion really were murder, then blowing up clinics to stop it would be perfectly justified. (There are well over 1,000,000 abortions every year in the United States alone. If one honestly believes that abortion is murder then he or she is logically committed to believing that we are living through the worst holocaust in all of human history. And if she or he honestly believed that, what excuse could there possibly be for not trying to end it by any means necessary?)

But since abortion is, in fact, not murder, clinic bombers aren’t right in destroying property or killing people. In fact they are terrorists and murderers.

Whatever the answer to the question is, though, it has to do with the correct account of what human rights people have, not with motivations and certainly not with the contents of the law.

So now we have two conditions, instead of the one being cited earlier:

1. Potential for violence
2. History of violence

But of course (1) and (2) aren’t sufficient for killing somebody either. There are lots of violent sex offenders out there, for example. In fact I could get a list of all the ones that are living near me from the state. Do I have the right to go down the list and slit all their throats? If not, why not? (I suspect there is more risk of them attacking people in their neighborhoods than someone in solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison being able to attack much of anyone.)

As for this: “he was still running a racket from prison which was killing more people,” if that were true, then the solution would be to put him back in solitary confinement, not to kill him. However, if you’re referring to the recent San Quentin press release, I’d be interested to know if you have absolutely any evidence at all for the assertion, other than the mere say-so of prison officials.