Comments Elsewhere

Lydia:

Think about it: What “Dixieland” says is that the singer loves his home region, that one of the reasons he loves it is because old times are not forgotten there, and that he intends to live and die there.

Context, please. “Dixie’s Land” was written by Dan Emmett in 1859 for his blackface minstrel show; here are the actual lyrics of the first verse and chorus, as they were originally sung:

I wish I was in land ob cotton, Old times dar am not forgotten, Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land. In Dixie Land whar’ I was born in, Early on one frosty mornin’, Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land. CHORUS: Den I wish I was in Dixie, Hoo-ray! Hoo-ray! In Dixie land, I’ll take my stand to lib and die in Dixie; Away, away, away down south in Dixie, Away, away, away down south in Dixie.

Now besides the “moonlight and magnolias” caricature of the romanticized South, with the clever euphemisms of “land of cotton” and “old times there are not forgotten” conveniently used to paper over the reality of plantation slavery—which ought to be creepy enough in itself—it is also worth noting that the song was written by white men for white men in blackface to sing, putting the words into the mouths of caricatured Black slaves. The singer is singing about his love for the land of his bondage and his longing to return there as soon as possible to “lib and die” on the plantation.

If you don’t find that creepy, I don’t know quite what to say.

Lydia, again:

Now I know, I’m all ready for the liberal outrage. How dare I say nice things about Dixieland (or even about “Dixieland”) when the old-time customs the southerners really wanted to preserve were slavery, discrimination, Jim Crow laws, and sundry other nasties, right?

But there is an odd double standard here. Saddam Hussein’s old-time customs were hardly nice, yet Dubya is probably one of the most Left-hated Republican presidents of all time on the grounds that he took it upon himself to go in without any immediate provocation and effect regime change so that, among other things, Saddam wouldn’t go on doing unpleasant things to his own people.

(1) How many of those Leftists go around singing the praises of “Land of Two Rivers” (the Iraqi national anthem under Saddam Hussein)?

(2) I mention (1) because there is actually a change of subject between the first paragraph above and the second. In the first you mention an objection that might be raised against praising the Confederacy; in the second you say that someone who condemns the Feds in the Iraq War ought to also condemn the Feds in the Civil War. That’s a perfectly just reply, but it’s not a reply to the objection raised in the first paragraph, because condemning the Feds and praising the Confederacy are not the same thing. You can (and indeed, I think there are awfully good reasons to say that you should) condemn both the Feds and the Confederacy.

Stephen Carson:

Cole, you ask a good question: “the South didn’t secede over state’s rights (I mean, what, were they just doing it to prove a point?)” I believe there is a good answer. As probably best documented in Tom DiLorenzo’s The Real Lincoln, there was ongoing contention over tariffs imposed on the South by the North which came to a head with the election of Lincoln whose whole career had protectionist tariffs as its theme (bet you never knew that… I didn’t). The upshot is that the South, with good reason, felt that the North was draining the South and spending the money on themselves.

Stephen, it is certainly true that protectionism, and the tariff in particular, were mentioned as injuries that the Southern states had suffered at the hands of the Northern states and the federal government. But the efforts to portray this as one of the chief causes of secession are frankly indulging in fantasy. South Carolina’s and Mississippi’s Declarations of Secession never once mention the tariff; indeed, neither mentions any reasons for secession other than the preservation of slavery and white supremacy. (MS: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.”) Texas’s mentions protectionist legislation in passing; here is everything that they had to say about it: “They have impoverished the slave-holding States by unequal and partial legislation, thereby enriching themselves by draining our substance.” Besides that single sentence, the declaration spends 13 paragraphs discussing slavery and the Federal government and Northern states’ hostility to it. (“She [Texas] was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery— the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits— a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time”; also: “We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.”) Georgia’s Declaration spends the most words on discussing protectionism; that is to say, it mentions it in 3 paragraphs and suggests that Northern commercial interests were behind anti-slavery agitation in the North after their political program of protectionism was defeated. However, it also spends 13 paragraphs discussing slavery, which it names first and last as the primary cause for secession. The records of the secession conventions and an analysis of the Confederate Constitution seem to reveal similar results. Vice President Alexander Stephens, it seems, was right when he declared of that Constitution, that “Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas [from those of the Declaration of Independence]; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. [Applause.] This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

It’s certainly true—as DiLorenzo, among others, reveals—that Lincoln’s motives, in going to war against the seceding states, were far from noble. However, it’s vitally important to realize that that doesn’t mean that the Confederates’ motives were any more noble than Lincoln’s.

Chris:

You [Cole] say, “The North didn’t fight to end slavery.” But remember the Battle Hymn itself—“As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.” That’s what they were singing, after all!

I suspect that Chris and Cole are both right but that they are discussing different things under the rubric of “the North” (which was not, literally speaking, a participant in the war, but rather a geographical region). “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and its predecessor “John Brown’s Body,” were soldiers’ songs, and it’s true that many soldiers who fought for the North saw themselves as fighting to end slavery. It’s equally true that, for the first half of the war at least, Lincoln (together with his administration) saw himself as fighting to crush secession, and not to end slavery (and that if he could save the Union without freeing a single slave, he would do so). Here, as elsewhere, it’s important not to conflate the thoughts, reasons, and judgments of government leaders with those of the rest of the country.

Kennedy: “I’d also note that if a male teacher had been having sex with a thirteen year old student he might well do hard time instead of nine months.”

I agree. The difference in treatment is indefensible. The crime ought to be punished equally severely, or equally leniently, whatever the gender of the older and younger “partners.”

Lopez: “Arguments for ‘age difference’ alone don’t hold water.”

Indeed. Which is why both age difference and the youth of one of the “partners” was mentioned above. A substantial age difference is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for what I said to apply. (It’s necessary because there’s an awful lot less reason to think that another 13 year old is sleazy for sleeping with a 13 year old than to think that a 28 year old is.)

Ghertner: “If the teen has the capacity to give meaningful consent, then how is it vice, sleazy, or exploitive?”

Because there are more vices than there are crimes, in sexual ethics as in all other kinds of ethics. Fulfilling your obligation not to rape anybody is important, but why would you think that there aren’t any other moral obligations that you have? If you think (as, indeed, you should) that sexual relationships ought to take place within something at least vaguely resembling a context of equality, reciprocity, and mutual responsibility, then there are plenty of good prima facie reasons to think that 28 year olds who sleep with 13 year olds are pretty sleazy.

N.B.: I don’t think that it’s usually true that a 13 year old has the capacity to give meaningful consent to a sexual encounter with an adult twice their age. But you can apply the above at whatever age you like, depending on where you think the age of meaningful consent is and where you think the age is at which sexual encounters with much older adults stop being sketchy.

Ghertner: “Is it exploitive for college professors to sleep with college students?”

I’m not quite sure what you’re asking.

If you’re asking about students who they encounter in an academic setting (e.g. in their classes or in their departments), then yes, of course it’s unethical for professors to sleep with those students. If this isn’t obvious, it ought to be.

If you’re asking about students and professors who happen to meet each other without having any particular academic relationship to one another, then I don’t know whether it’s sleazy for the professor to sleep with the student or not. I imagine that it depends on the specifics of the case.

Kennedy:

If anything it’s vice. Scbools should be free to ban her as the see fit and that’s about the end of it.

Well, it’s clear that wildly unethical sexual conduct with students is, by itself, just a vice, not a crime. It’s not nearly so clear that adults sleeping with 8th graders ought to be considered merely a vice; if you think that the youth of one of the “partners” and the age difference between them substantially undermines the ability to give consent, then the adult would be guilty of rape.

I happen to think that it ought to be considered criminal, but there are understandable arguments to the contrary; questions of consent, childhood, and adolescence are usually pretty vexed. The point, though, is there are good reasons to consider it vicious no matter what answer you give to the question of whether or not it ought to be considered criminal (because it’s sleazy and exploitative).

Compared to the sort of reliability in the administration of criminal justice that would be needed for the criminal justice system to be trusted with the sort of penalties that it currently administers, I expect.

Is there supposed to be some sort of logical problem with Stevens’s statement? If so, what?

Micha:

Constant, there is a double standard, but there is no reason to think that, in order to fix the inconsistency, we should oppose female adults having sex with male teens, rather than not opposing male adults having sex with female teens.

Of course there’s a reason to think that. The reason is that it’s sleazy to fuck 8th graders less than half your age.

It’s also worth noting that age is not the only fact that needs to be considered in this case, anyway. Whatever their ages, it’s also wildly unethical for teachers to have sex with their students—whether or not the students consent.

(N.B.: I’m taking no stand, for the moment at least, on whether either of these should be considered a crime, or merely a vice; I’m just saying that they are wrong. If these reasons are not intuitive enough, I can talk about it some more, but really “Hey, don’t fuck 13 year olds” seems on its face like a pretty reasonable rule for adults to follow.)

Scott:

What the hell are you talking about? Of course the double standard’s acceptable. Men and women are not the same. I read it in a biology book.

I hear that blue-eyed people and brown-eyed people have discernable genetic differences, too. The question is what specific differences you think there are that would justify a double standard on this count.

And Ghertner, when I have kids, you stay the hell away from my daughters.

But you’d be just fine with him fucking your 13 year old sons?

M. Simon:

America didn’t just kill Indians. For the most part we were in a continuous state of war with them. The fact that the Indians liked to kill civilians (which was reciprocated to some extent) ought to enter into the calculation. Treaty breaking and various stupidites were done by both sides.

This is absolute nonsense on several fronts.

“America” was not a “side” in any war; it is a pair of continents. Nor were “Indians” a “side” in any war; the word describes several different independent nations of people spread out across those two continents, who have and had a bewildering variety of cultures, religions, economic systems, languages, technological levels, political constitutions, etc. etc. etc. over the course of tens of thousands of years’ worth of history, including nations that fought with white people and nations that allied with white people and nations that never met white people at all and nations that fought with or allied with each other. Talking about relations between “America” and its relations with “Indians” is precisely as historically enlightening as talking about relations between “Eurasia” and “Europeans.” Which is to say, not at all. If you want to talk about something specific (like the ethnic cleansing-cum-genocide committed against the Cherokee in Georgia, or the wars fought against the Creek or Seminole, or the wars against the Plains Indians in the late 19th century), then we can do so. I think you’ll find that each of these are quite different cases, and that some of them involved atrocities on both sides and others were little more than unilateral slaughter.

But the problem is that not only is this absolute nonsense, but also that the more specific cases you seem to want to refer to are one and all irrelevant to the point. There certainly were some wars with Indian nations in which atrocities were committed against white people by members of those nations. So what? The fact that atrocities are committed by both sides doesn’t make atrocities by either side justifiable. This is part of the ethical point being made throughout this thread: wrong is wrong no matter who, or how many, are doing it.

M. Simon, again:

And yes. Hitler loved cowboys and Indians. He patterned his camps after the camps for Indians.

That’s part of the reason why it’s not an apples-and-oranges comparison.

M. Simon, again:

So perhaps the calculation in WW2 (right or wrong) was to avoid repeating that mistake. We got to dictate the Japanese Constitution and their type of government. Something not possible without complete defeat.

…

The question in 1945 was not was Japan a current threat. It was – will they be one in the future without complete defeat. Once you pay the price for a hot war it is good to finish the job. if you can.

So do you believe that it’s OK to incinerate half a million innocent civilians, in a country that no longer poses any military threat to you, if you can make improvements to their constitution by doing so?

Can’t you think of any way of averting future wars that doesn’t involve the use of terror-bombing to kill hundreds of thousands of non-combatants?

I said a while back that, instead of sending Bob Wallace’s columns at LRC down the memory hole, a more honest way to deal with the situation would have been to leave the old columns up, and put up a note to the effect that LRC would no longer be carrying his columns for whatever reasons Lew has for not wanting to carry his columns anymore. Kinsella replied:

Kinsella: “I have seldom read more idiotic comments in my short life.”

The cheap shot reply would be to ask whether these comments were really more idiotic than “Jews will always be ostracized because of their attempts to destroy every culture that admits them.”

The higher ground reply would be to point out that Lew apparently thought that Wallace’s idiocy was embarassing enough to justify no longer carrying his columns. Given that this is the case, I wonder whether Kinsella really thinks that simply erasing the record of the old columns, without comment or explanation, is really the most honest way of dealing with the situation. For myself, I know that I don’t see much to admire in giving your past mistakes that sort of Disappearing Commisar treatment.

Joe Miller to Micha: “Why think that you need to have your consequentialist card revoked? There are good consequentialist reasons for thinking that there ought to be limits to the sorts of actions that are permitted in war. It just requires a move to indirect utilitarianism.”

Joe explains the line of argument further below: “I would argue further that, because exceptions are so rare and because the opportunities for mistakes are so great, that it’s also utility-maximizing to disallow making exceptions. That will mean giving up on some opportunities to maximize utility by breaking rules, but that loss is outweighed by eliminating all of the incorrect rule-violations.”

Well, this is one possible consequentialist ground for placing some means completely off-limits. I’m not sure it’s the most convincing one, though: at best it seems to make a case for a rule of extreme caution, not a rule of absolute prohibition; if it really makes sense to say that utility could ever outweigh the disutility of nuclear massacres, and all actions should be judged by the balance of utility over disutility that they cause, then all these constraints seem to suggest is that you should demand that people very carefully demonstrate the alleged benefits of the nuclear massacre before you let the bombs drop. But that hardly captures the intuition that a lot of people want to capture — that incinerating innocent people is categorically wrong, not just a policy that bears a very high burden of proof. Even if this objection is decisive, though, it doesn’t actually mean the end of the game for consequentialism; it just means the end of the game for utilitarianism. But not all consequentialists are utilitarians; and if you think (as G. E. Moore, for example, did) that consequences like cruelty, enmity, ugliness, etc. are great positive evils in themselves, without any reference to their effects on anyone’s utility or disutility, then you may have pretty strong grounds for condemning certain kinds of atrocities as evils in themselves (because they essentially involve some of these great evils) no matter what further effects they may have on things like pleasure-pain balances.

As I mentioned in the original post, I’m more interested in the meta-ethical issue here than the political one — not because the political one isn’t important, but rather because you need to be clear on what you’re arguing over if the argument is going to make any sense. (So accusations that Jacob was indulging in “moral relativism” are misplaced, because what he was actually arguing was precisely the opposite. The actual disagreement was either (a) over the general ethical principles that he was employing, or (b) his understanding of the specific historical case to which he was applying those principles; pretending as if he were indulging in relativism, and giving up on objective ethical principles entirely, just clouds the issue in a particularly inane way.)

However, a couple of notes.

Faré: “(1) 9/11 was not a military target at all, it had no military purpose whatsoever.”

You may be forgetting that there were actually two different targets attacked on September 11th. One, the World Trade Center, was clearly not a military target. Another, the Pentagon, clearly was a military target. (Also, of course, the attacks killed a few hundred civilians on the hijacked airplanes.) Complaints against the deliberate killing of civilians in the course of striking “non-military” targets apply to the attacks on the World Trade Center, but they don’t apply to “9/11” in general. (Of course, there may be other reasons to condemn the attack on the Pentagon while not condemning the incineration of Hiroshima. But distinctions between “military” and “non-military” targets won’t cut that ice.)

Dave: “I guess what I really object to is the finger pointing school of history where various people glean the record for ‘facts’, usually taken out of context which they then use to mislead the innocent, ignorant and score points in a debate which has nothing to do with the historical subject in question. This usually takes the form of apple and oranges comparisons such as ‘Well, how can you Americans be so indignant about up about the Nazi’s taking over Poland, Ha!, the Americans took over the Indian’s land.’ You can play that game ad nauseaum. On that basis we had no moral right to oppose the Nazi’s.”

I’m not sure at all why comparing Hitler’s war of conquest, and willingness to engage in ethnic cleansing and genocide, to the American government’s repeated wars of conquest, and willingness to engage repeatedly in ethnic cleansing and genocide against several different Indian nations over a period of a century or so, is an “apples and oranges comparison”—particularly when Hitler explicitly cited the treatment of Indians in the American West as a model for his own campaign for Lebensraum. But whether the comparison is a just one or an unjust one, I must say that I’m mystified by the claim that such comparisons issue in the claim that “we had no moral right to oppose the Nazis”. According to whom? All that follows if the American government’s treatment of Cherokees, Creeks, Sioux, Apache, etc. was morally comparable to Hitler’s treatment of Jews, Poles, Czechs, Romani, etc., then you can’t excuse one and condemn the other — they have to either both be condemned or both be excused. It doesn’t follow that the American government (far less individual American citizens) didn’t have the right to condemn the Nazis, nor does it follow that they didn’t have the right to use force to oppose them. It just means that if they are going to condemn them and advocate resistence, then they ought also condemn the American government’s comparable actions, and to endorse the Indians’ right to resist then. Consistency is the key here.

Now you might object they’re not really comparable. Fine, but then you ought to give an argument for why they’re not really comparable. Knocking down a strawman position that allegedly undermines just condemnation of, or forcible resistence to, Nazism, or Islamist terrorism, or whatever it is you happen to be concerned with at the moment, is just a distraction from the real argument.

Tom: “Not all objectives are morally equal. Killing the infidel because he’s an infidel is different than — and inferior to — defeating Japan because it posed a military threat to the U.S.”

(1) Tokyo was firebombed in March, 1945 and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were incinerated in August of the same year. Do you seriously intend to claim that Japan posed a substantial military threat to the United States in March – August 1945? If so, what in the world do you think they were about to do? If not, why do you claim that the “objective” of the bombings was to defeat a military threat to the U.S.?

(2) Micha actually nowhere claimed that all objectives are morally equal. (Even if he did, that would not be moral relativism either; it would be moral nihilism. Relativists don’t claim that no objective is better than any other; what they claim is that the question of whether one objective is morally better than another always has to be answered relative to someone’s frame of reference, and that the correct judgments can differ for different people.) All he claimed is that Truman and bin Laden are in the same moral position as far as means are concerned: if noble ends could justify Truman’s means (whether or not Truman’s ends actually were noble), then noble ends could just as easily justify bin Laden’s means (whether or not bin Laden’s ends actually were noble). And if the ends couldn’t justify bin Laden’s means, then they couldn’t justify Truman’s either. The point of raising this point is that a lot of people think that no possible end, no matter how noble or ignoble, could justify bin Laden’s means. But if they want to say that, they had better be willing to say the same thing about Truman too — and accept the logical consequences that follow.

Kennedy: “I don’t see how you can criticize LRC for punting Wallace. What reaction would satisfy you?”

Well, punting Wallace is for the best but the memory-hole treatment is not really an appropriate way to deal with embarrassing fascists. A public statement that they’d no longer be carrying Bob Wallace’s columns and the reasons for it would have been more honest.

Stefan: “How is the argument that open borders exacerbate terrorism a bigoted argument? Or the argument that since different groups can never get along, they should be separated in order to make everybody happier? Those don’t seem like bigoted arguments.”

Neither argument for immigration restrictions can succeed except on the presumption that it’s OK to use violent means to control the movement of individual foreigners, without any evidence of actual or threatened wrongdoing, in order to stop some vaguely-specified group of other foreigners from committing or threatening some vaguely-specified wrongdoing. That seems pretty bigoted to me. (It also usually requires some further forms of bigotry — e.g. the baseless idea that foreigners, as such, pose any greater threat to your safety than God-fearing Americans, or the similarly baseless idea that you can do whatever you like to innocent individual people in order to safeguard the Volkisch purity of your neighborhood. But even without these further premises, the position itself requires bigotry to justify itself.)

But Lopez is right to point out that he specifically mentioned racism, not bigotry at large. The reasons you cited are examples of reasons that are bigoted but not racist.