Steve Watson

What’s the Point of This?

May 8, 2017 – 10:20 am

 

A: Imagine this	B: Look at this
Something big wrapped in plastic	Christo Javacheff (2000) Wrapped Reichstag Project for Berlin
A pickled cow	Damien Hirst (1995) Mother and Child, Divided
Some bricks	William Anastasi (1964) En Route (Stack of Bricks) Originally untitled
A toilet	Marcel Duchamp (1917) Fountain
A bike seat with handlebars arranged like a bull	Pablo Picasso (1943) Head of a Bull
Dirty sheets	Tracy Emin (1999) I Think It Must Have Been Fear
A light turning on/off	Martin Creed (2007) Work No. 227: The Lights Going On and Off
A picture of a soup can	Andy Warhol (1968) Soup Can
A really big comic book	Roy Lichtenstein (1962) Blam
repeat ad nauseam . . .	. . . .

What do you get from column B that you don’t get from column A? Whatever you get has little to do with Art – if Art is anything more specific than ‘an experience.’ As Art therefore, the elements of column B are purely pointless.

 

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Art vs. Pornography

May 7, 2017 – 11:06 pm

Many defenders of Bill Henson’s pictures of naked sexualised children claim that the public (Philistines) are wrong to condemn Henson’s work as pornography because they are art. (But note that some in the Art world’s ‘in crowd’ were prepared to admit Henson’s offensiveness before the public noticed.) In making this claim they appear to be confusing two applicable dichotomies: that which divides images that are pornographic from those that are not; and that which divides images that are Art from those that are not. They ignore the perfectly valid possibility that an image may be both Art and pornography. Without getting into the weeds of definitions, it’s clear enough that, whatever Art might be, Pornography is understood and sanctioned as something belonging to a category of items that if allowed currency would be damaging to public morality. The following grid shows the possible combinations and some representatives.

	Pornography	Not Pornography
Art	Bill Henson	Sandro Botticelli
Not Art	Kayleigh Pearson	C. M. Coolidge

The situation is slightly confused by the possibility that the current Australian law that regulates these things (and I will not pretend any familiarity with it) does make some allowance for artistic license. In a previous version of the law, I believe, a disputed piece might be given a pass on the basis of  ‘expert opinion’ as to its ‘artistic merit’. In that case, legally speaking, the category of pornographic art is effectively empty. (Also, if that were the case, the public would be right to conclude that the law is a ass.) Let us suppose, however, that the Henson defenders intend more than a purely legal claim. How then could we charitably interpret their claims that Art should not be restricted by pornography laws; and could such claims be reasonably defended?

If Artists want the public to accept that a picture is de facto rather than de jure not pornography just because it is Art, they will need to defend that claim. Given that they accept that the very same picture that counted as pornography when found on some dirty old man’s hard drive would not be pornography if it were hung in a gallery and accepted by them as Art, they will have to argue that Art is defined as Art by something external to the artwork itself. What could this possibly be, and could whatever it is really provide a guarantee that Art is not Pornography? Several possibilities seem most likely to be argued here:

1. Perhaps it is the intention of the artist that is relevant. A thing is or is not pornography depending on whether or not the artist willed it to be so. This seems to be a promising line: it’s obviously true that the intention of the pornographer and the intention of the artist are supposed to be quite different – the pornographer intends to pander to our basest preferences, and the Artist (one is certain) has some other purpose in mind.

But this will not do. The arguments of Beardsley and Wimsatt against the ‘Intentional Fallacy‘ apply here more effectively even than in the cases that those authors intended. Recall that Pornography is understood and sanctioned according to its feared effects on public morality, and the intentions of the artist in the case will almost always be irrelevant to the effects of the artwork. (In general, indeed, we have no access to the artists intentions, so interpretation that relies on this access is impossible.) A thing is or is not pornography without regard to what the intention of the artist might have been in creating it.

2. Is it then the intention of the set of experiencers, the audience let’s say, that makes the difference; so that whether something is pornography or not depends upon the attitudes that the audience members take to the experience of the artwork? That is what seems to be suggested by the objection to the previous proposal. If the audience can be relied on not to be badly affected by the art, not to be titillated, not to have base motives excited, etc., then surely the Artwork is not to be considered to be pornographic. So an Artwork that appears in an Art gallery and is seen by the Art crowd can have no evil tendencies. Therefore it cannot be pornography.

It is certainly possible that some specialised audiences might be more resistant to the corrupting influence of some works than others, but even if that were true that wouldn’t support the claim being made. In that argument the audience of the Artwork has now been restricted to a  non-random subset of the possible audience, whereas the understanding of pornography that we have is that it is defined in reference to the effects of the work if it is available to be experienced by the entire possible audience (or, equivalently, to random subsets of it.) The claim that could be made here is that the Artwork is not harmful if the audience is an Art crowd, but that’s not the same as saying that the Artwork is not pornography. Child pornography appreciated by the Art crowd would still be pornography.

If it is claimed that Art should have a special dispensation from this moral judgement – and artists have recently been keen to claim that they are above the moral laws that apply to the rest of benighted mankind (especially since the mid XIX^th C, see Grana Modernity and its Discontents) – then they will need to make the case for that privilege. I can’t see any prospect of a successful argument along those lines, but suppose that we accepted this proposal; what then? Well, since the argument does not deny that the State may have an interest in restricting some forms of symbolic production on the grounds of public good, we will need to know when to apply this privilege.

1. Perhaps we may be supplied with an uncontroversial, non-trivialising, and impartially applicable definition of Art that will operate as a filter: each piece may be tested against this definition and a decision reached as to whether the thing is Art or not and the Art privilege is to operate or not.

Unfortunately, given the controversy that has surrounded all previous proposed definitions of Art, I think we have good reason to believe that no such objective and applicable characterization of Art is to be had. There is a further irony in this case that in previous attacks on ‘Modern Art,’ where it has been claimed that this or that piece is “not Art,” the response of the Art crowd had been to mockingly and rhetorically demand a definition of Art from their attackers. Failing to be able to say what is or is not Art has for some reason been seen as giving the Artist the ability to claim that whatever he wants to do is Art. (It should have made Artists wonder what on earth the point of their occupation was, and it should have made Art funding bodies wonder about what their (usually tax-derived) money was funding. But that’s another topic.)

2. Perhaps we can can take the Art crowd at their word then, and define Art as what Artists do. Then, anything that looks like Pornography but is done by an artist would invoke the Art privilege. All that remains is to find a definition of an Artist that is not equivalent to ‘someone who makes Art.’ Since Artist’s are to be the beneficiaries of a privilege extended by the State, the State will have to agree on the method of discrimination – rather like the priesthood or the medical profession. Perhaps he is to be a member of an official body of state-recognised artists – a sort of Arts Academy with legal teeth. How will membership be determined? How will Artists enjoy being organized by the State? (It wouldn’t exactly be consistent with their revolutionary posturing would it? In fact, wasn’t Modern Art largely a rejection of the Academy Art of earlier times?) And will their audiences be similarly organized in order to benefit from the Art privilege? A State-run connoisseur’s club? All this hardly seems to be in the spirit of the defences of Bill Henson; and a solution on these grounds might seem to be worse than the problem it is intended to solve.

3. Perhaps it will be claimed that Art is what happens in Art venues; but I think it’s pretty obvious that all the same problems that attached to Art-as-what-Artists-do will also apply here m.

No, I am afraid it will not do. There can be no Art privilege in these matters. Artists will just have to accept that they must obey the same rules as the rest of the citizenry – and Bill Henson should stop taking pictures of naked children.

---

Andrew Bolt has an amusing debunking of particularly bad arguments given in support of Bill Henson and the Art Privilege in Prejudices stripped bare (Herald Sun, 28/05/2008)

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A Modest Proposal for Middle-East Peace

May 7, 2017 – 10:52 pm

Context

UN resolution 242 calls for a withdrawal to secure and recognised borders.

Israel may have to accept that no conceivable borders can satisfy both criteria. The Arabs maintain a maximalist (or very nearly) interpretation which insists on Israeli withdrawal to the 1948 borders, but these are impossible for Israel , given the hostility of the surrounding states – and especially if the state that arises in the vacated territory is hostile. The evidence of the withdrawal from Gaza and from South Lebanon is that such a state would indeed be hostile.

Desiderata

Israel cannot

1.      maintain a military occupation of conquered territory and a conquered population indefinitely,

2.      annex all the disputed territories and make the Arab population citizens of Israel ,

3.      withdraw to the 1948 borders leaving a hostile entity in the disputed evacuated territories,

Israel must

a.     control the Jordan valley

b.     have guaranteed access to East Jerusalem religious sites – and in the view of the Israeli population, probably must retain sovereignty over those sites

c.     be able to neutralise the danger of Arab irredentism/revanchism/etc.

d.     rid itself of the burden of controlling a hostile and essentially irreconcilable population

e.     resolve the issue of the settlements in the disputed territories humanely (evacuation? extraterritoriality? retained control? Population transfers? etc.)

Israel would prefer

         i.     a ‘Palestinian’ polity (PP) to control and be responsible for the Palestinian Arab population

       ii.      a stable cooperative regime in any Palestinian polity

      iii.      not to be required to concern itself with the internal affairs of the PP (even if it became hostile or unstable)

     iv.       an internationally recognised solution (but can probably be satisfied with one which is merely acceptable to America

Arabs require

A.   an independent polity

B.    a viable polity

C.    access to East Jerusalem religious sites – and have always maintained that the sanctuary must be their sovereign territory (but see Israeli b)

D.    a polity free of Jewish settlers – though they might be permitted to remain as dhimmi

Opportunity

The time is right for an Israeli unilateral solution to the problem of the Disputed Territories

1.     PA is thoroughly discredited internationally because of its involvement in terror, corruption

2.     PA leadership is recognised as not being capable of making peace ( Camp David , intifada Hamas elections, etc.)

3.     the overwhelming likelihood of the hostility of any potential PP is recognised, and Israeli security concerns are as widely recognised as can ever be expected to be the case

4.     America sees the relation between the Israel- ‘Palestinian’ conflict and the wider West-Islam friction – and also associates the Arab allies of the Palestinians with threats to American interests

5.     Middle-Eastern ‘stability’ is no longer valued per se

Proposal

Under the Oslo agreements the disputed territories were divided into classes of territories as A, B, C. The PA was given control of area A territories. These were territories surrounding centres of Arab population. Under this system the PA controlled over 95% of the Palestinian Arab population.

I propose that

1.     Palestinian area A be taken as the basis for a PP with whatever other areas are required to make those areas minimally viable.

The intention under Oslo was that PA control would eventually be extended over Pal. B territories etc to create a contiguous/connected territory. Gaza would always remain unconnected however.

2.     The effort to create a single Palestinian state as a PP should be abandoned. The PP may be instituted as separate, independent governments of the Palestinian cities and their hinterlands.

(Since the problem of non-contiguous Gaza will have to be faced anyway, there is no reason that whatever solution may be found for Gaza’s communication with the PP instituted on the West Bank would not serve equally well for communication in this plan.)

3.     Territory not assigned to the PP should be annexed to Israel .

4.     Population of the annexed territories may either become citizens of Israel or may be compensated and allowed to transfer to any part of the PP.

5.     Jewish population of the areas assigned to the PP either become citizens there or are relocated with compensation (by Israel .)

Process

1.     Reoccupy all Disputed Territories

2.     Delimit PP zones: I suggest Ramallah, Bethlehem , Hebron , Jericho , Tulkarm/Qalqilya, Jenin and their hinterlands

3.     Separate populations

4.     Annex unassigned territories to Israel

5.     Build a fence around the PP territories (This is already largely completed.)

6.     The final stage has two possibilities

1.      Clean Break (strongly preferred)

1.     Withdraw from PP territories

2.      Nation Building (invents a new quagmire to replace the old one)

1.     Remove all PA officials

2.     Disarm and demobilise all PA security forces and other ‘formal’ militias (Hamas, etc.)

3.     Remove terrorist infrastructure – including UNRWA, EU, NGOs

4.     Assume responsibility for administration of PP

5.     Assume responsibility for funding of PP

6.     Incrementally develop native administration of PP

7.     Incrementally withdraw from PP

Advantages

1.     Largely removes need for prolonged negotiations (Arabs have shown no good faith previously)

2.     Provides quick, relatively neat final solution to be put in place; removes uncertainties

3.     Provides a separation of populations desired by both sides

4.     Provides strategic depth to Israel – all of Jordan valley (west bank lowlands) held by Israel

5.     Allows a hostile PP to be quarantined from sources of weaponry

6.     Allows maximal control of population movements from PP to Israel continuing the reduction in levels of violence that the incomplete fence has already achieved

7.     Preserves Jewish character of Israel and Arab character of PP(assignment of lands and populations results in only a small increase in the Arab population of Israel )

8.     Allows Israel to cease governing hostile alien population either immediately (preferred) or relatively quickly and on a known schedule

9.     Provides immediately/eventually for independent Palestinian Arab governance of an independent PP.

10.   After withdrawal PP internal politics need no longer concern Israel vitally

11.   Although there is the opportunity to create a functioning liberal regime in the PP, nothing hangs on this. (The example of the current dysfunctional government does not encourage such a commitment – hence the preference for Clean Break)

12.   Both strategies – but Clean Break especially – provide Israeli forces with a foreseeable end, improving morale

Disadvantages

1.     Unilaterality means no other actors are committed to the success of the proposal

(It is not clear how much of a disadvantage this is. Arab states are apparently incapable of publicly supporting any peace deal, Egypt and Jordan notwithstanding, so no peace proposal can be made dependent upon their approval or cooperation. In the best case they may acquiesce, though they are most likely to continue their current hostility.)

2.     Proposal falls far short of satisfying the Arab maximalist position, or even the ’48 or bust’ solution. For this reason it will be unacceptable to Arabs and some others.

(Whether Europe and others will seriously dispute the execution of this proposal is unknown. They will certainly complain and decry its ‘unfairness’ pro forma, but they seem to have no interests requiring more.)

3.     ‘Viability’ of PP is likely to be disputed

This will be answered in detailed arrangementsfor communication and general access through Israeli territories. I see no reason why cities and suitable hinter;ands may not be viable, given good will on the Israeli side.

4.     Dependence on Israeli ‘good will’ is humiliating and will ensure hostility

Possibly true. However, Israeli security could hardly be secured without infringing Arab ‘honour.’ Moreover, PP hostility is irrelevant if they can be made impotent.

5.     Will probably make many Jewish religious sites inaccessible if PP is hostile.

Unfortunate, but not unbearable

6.     No concessions are made to long-standing Arab demands – whether those demands were sincerely made or not – which will upset some

(See final status settlement for East Jerusalem , Refugees, etc.)

Problems

1.     Status of East Jerusalem

Old City will remain in Israel . Arab inhabitants will be given choice of citizenship in Israel or PP. Etzion Bloc to go to Israel .

Any person to have the right to visit the sacred sites in the Old City – principally referring to the right of Muslims to visit the Haram.

Temple Mount outside the Haram to be Israeli territory. Haram to be shared sovereignty with some appropriate authority. The form of words may be left for diplomacy, but the facts will be something like: PP administration over Haram, Israeli security about Haram (including authority to quarantine or restrict access if incitement leads to violence or general level of PP hostility makes it dangerous.)

2.     Right of Return

Denied, of course. However, final compensation may be paid to a responsible UN agency for distribution amongst claimants, or paid to PP authorities with understanding that misappropriation on their part will not void the finality. Amount of final compensation to be set by Israel . A process to determine a fair amount to be decided upon. It is to be made clear that compensation is humanitarian aid and does not constitute an admission of guilt or liability for disadvantages.

The Arabs will almost certainly decline to cooperate. Israel may put this compensatory money in an escrow account to be tapped whenever they decide to accept it. This would actually be good for the Palestinian Arabs as symbolizing finality of claims and providing capital; and would be symbolically good for Israel as demonstrating bona fides

3.     Arab State Hostility

No change in current status except perhaps with respect to Egypt and Jordan .

Egypt has a very Cold Peace with Israel and government has made no effort to pretend that anything more than the desire for US money makes them pay lip service to the peace. There will be no change here, despite popular unrest

Jordan ‘s political shape may be more seriously affected. Israeli unilateralism – which Jordanians will see as a repudiation of the ‘land for peace’ formula to which Jordan has been committed and by which Jordan has tried to justify its peace – will be read as a betrayal of the principles of the peace.

Syria will do what it can to derail the process if there is no concession on the Golan Heights . Syria and Iran may take the opportunity to incite their collaborating forces in Lebanon to conflict with Israel . Unfortunate, but that was always going to happen whatever Israel did.

Diplomatic activity may be able to ameliorate some of this hostility. Perhaps some concessions may be made.

Egypt will be given joint control with the PP over the Gaza border with it – as it has now wrt the PA.

Jordan may be given an administrative role for the Haram. This has the advantage of playing into a threat of Hashemite revanchism wrt the sites at Mecca and Medina, and threatening Saudi control of Arabia . A threat which it is handy to have in the background when negotiating for Saudi cooperation.

 

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Use of Wikipedia

May 7, 2017 – 10:47 pm

The following is from an email I sent on 22/03/2007. I thought I might as well keep it here as anywhere.

Some people have pointed out that wikipedia articles often say true things. That may very well be so. In fact it might even be the case that, in general, it so happens that wikipedia articles are as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica articles; but that is really quite irrelevant to the question of whether wikipedia is a suitable reference for academic work. The real question is whether wikipedia can satisfy the accepted epistemological criteria which define the collective enterprise of modern Western scholarship.

If I decided to estimate the number of people in a room by rolling dice and adding the spots, it might happen that I got a true answer; and if I decided whether to take an umbrella to work by reading the entrails of a chicken, it might again happen that I got a true answer. But we do not accept that these are acceptable ways to arrive at the truth. What we prefer in these cases is to count the students or to look at the sky. Error is still possible, but experience has shown that the latter methods are vastly more reliable than the former and they are therefore to be preferred on epistemological grounds.

Through bitter experience and disciplined thinking modern Western scholarship has determined a set of standards and methods that are believed to maximize the reliability of the outcomes for this collective enterprise. These are the standards and methods with which we are familiar. One of these standards is that we prefer to trust someone who has been accepted as an expert in some area by others who are interested in that area. Another is that we test new scholarship by peer review by accepted experts. Another again is that when we refer to some supposed fact we support it by appealing to the agreement of some trusted expert. None of this is guaranteed to find Truth: experts will disagree, frauds and fads will occur, and accepted facts will change. It is only our best known method.

Wikipedia, by contrast, deliberately flouts these standards. Does that make it unacceptable? Well, that depends upon whether you think that the standards and methods embodied in wikipedia are as likely to yield reliable results as the standards and methods that they replace. Is that plausible? Is it plausible that the rejection of any preference for expertise in determining trustworthiness will lead to more reliability in scholarly results? Is it likely that the preferences of the most persistent editors will provide results as reliable as the preferences of the generally accepted experts? I would suggest that that is vanishingly unlikely. Wikipedia would replace the present accepted standards with worse, less productive standards.

The wikipedia model should therefore be rejected as a possible amendment to the epistemological criteria of modern Western scholarship; and consequently, we should insist that students avoid references to wikipedia, because we have a duty to train them in the best traditions of modern Western scholarship, and wikipedia is opposed to those traditions.

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T-Legality – A Modality for Legal Activists

May 7, 2017 – 10:25 pm

From Megan McArdle

A commenter claims:

Umm, you can make “corporations” (or engineers) give us more fuel-efficient cars simply by increasing fuel efficiency standards. If they passed a law tomorrow that said all cars sold by 2010 must get 45mpg, Detroit could do that pretty easily. They just don’t, because they don’t have to.

Apparently making a law that P means that P is the case. It’s an interesting point of view. Let’s see if we can establish a modal logic for that view of legislative power.

We define the modal operators L (the analogue to []) and P (like <>)

Lp =: It’s a law that p

Pp =: ~L~p =: it’s legal that p

Let’s take the semantic approach by defining the rules of the semantic tableaux for the appropriate logic.

LN                    ~PX              w/

                            …      

                          L~X              w                  

 

                        ~LX                w/

                          …

                         P~X               w

 

PR                     PX                w/v      

                            …                              

                          wAv

                            X                  v

                         where v is new to this path

The accessibility relation A is a legal accessibility relation, and the indexes on the right indicate legal worlds. PR tells us that if X is not forbidden by law in w then in some state v, accessible by lawyers from w X occurs.

LR                     LX                w\v      

                          wAv

                           …                              

                            X                  v

Which tells us that if X is mandated by law in w, then in any state v accessible by lawyers from w X occurs.

We know that LA -> A, which is a statement of Legal Reflexivity, won’t be a valid formula in this logic (try the tree and see,) but if we add the rule (following the Hintikka strategy:)

LT                    LX                  w      

                           …                              

                           X                   w

Or if we declare that the accessibility relation is reflexive (according to the Orthodox strategy:)

Refl                     …                              

                           wAw

                           for any w on this branch

We also know that there is an axiomatization that will give us just the same valid formulas in LTS:

We need a rule of inference of Legal Necessitation on the analogy of plain Necessitation:

LR1: |- A => |- LA

Which, curiously enough, indicates that anything that can be shown to be a thesis in the logic must be a Law.

The axioms required are

L1:  L(A -> B) -> (LA -> LB)             (Distribution of L over -> )

L2: LA -> A                                           (Reflexivity)

L1 itself would give us KL (Lawyers’ K,) and it has the at first sight odd result of saying that if it is a law that A -> B then if it’s a law that A, it is equally a law that B. But how odd is that? We could reasonably understand this as a statement of proper legal interpretation: if the law states that A and the law also states that whenever A then B, then it is at least implicitly according to law that B. (Roe vs. Wade seems to have been decided in this way.)

The axiom L2 gives us TL, Lawyers’ T. It’s an explicit statement of the claim that we started with.

This is a fairly weak logic, even amongst Normal logics. Do we want to add any other conditions? Do we want to give the legal accessibility relation symmetry or transitivity? What would these look like?

LT to L4? 

Add the property of transitivity to the accessibility relation in LT

Trans               wAv

                           vAu

                             …                              

                           wAu

 

Try                  Lp -> LLp

                        We find that it closes in L4 but not in LT.

Is this something we want? That if it’s a law that X then it’s a law that it’s a law that X? That actually seems quite reasonable, especially if we interpret ‘being a law’ in the way that we did for the distributivity axiom. Thus; if it’s a law that X then it’s at least implicitly according to law that it’s a law that X. Perhaps this is referring to some sort of constitutional understanding of the law.

LT to LB?

Add the property of symmetry to the accessibility relation in LT

Sym                 wAv

                            …                              

                           vAw

Try                  p -> LPp

                       We find that it closes in LB but not in LT.

Is this something we want? It’s a bit harder to understand. If something is occurring then by law there is no law against it. I have to say, that seems unlikely. So let’s not go so far as LB. (Nor, of course, can we accept L5, which we’d get by making the relation an equivalence relation.) So the accessibility relation can’t be symmetric: if v is accessible to lawyers from w it doesn’t follow that w is accessible to lawyers from v.

Even if we just stick to LT there are plenty of interesting results for the lawyers to get busy on. The following are all provable in LTS:

LTS1:    L(A <-> B) -> (LA <-> LB)

LTS2:    L(A & B) <-> (LA & LB)

LTS3:    LA <-> ~P~A

LTS4:    L~A <-> ~PA

LTS5:    ~P(A v B) <-> (~PA & ~PB)

LTS6:    P(A v B) <-> (PA & PB)

LTS7:    L(A -> B) -> (PA -> PB)

LTS8:    (LA v LB) -> L(A v B)

LTS9:    P(A & B) -> (PA & PB)

Actually, I started writing this as a bit of a joke, but I now wonder if there might not be a non-silly way to apply modality to laws. 

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The Intrinsic Value of Plants

May 7, 2017 – 10:20 pm

The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology has issued a report, “The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants,” which declares that the ‘dignity’ of plants must be considered in our handling of them. Apparently “living organisms should be considered morally for their own sake because they are alive” and plants are living organisms. Since according to this argument their moral relevance doesn’t derive from their being able to think or even to feel pain or pleasure, it seems that we have to understand that what makes them relevant is that, as living things, they have per ipso facto solo intrinsic moral value.

But why should this be so? I can only assume that the Swiss Committee is under the influence of a very poor argument that the Deep Greens use to justify their claim that non-sentient, non-human, even inanimate things can have intrinsic value. The ‘argument’ they offer is just some variation on a simple thought experiment, which goes like this:

Imagine the universe without people: would it be better or worse if it had rocks, trees, butterflies in it?

Stated this way you might think, yes, it’d be nicer if there were rocks, or trees, or butterflies. And if you’re prepared to admit this then, since the world is better with those things, and there are no humans, then there can be higher and lower values in a world without humans. So those values can’t derive from the intrinsic value of humans. So the values must be intrinsic to the things in the world without humans. So there is an intrinsic value rocks, and trees, and butterflies, and to anything else you might name. But beware! In expressing your preference for a world in which there were those things, you are just expressing your preference between two possible worlds if you were there to make the judgement, whereas the experiment in its setup says you are not there. So, let’s rephrase the experiment.

Imagine you did not exist: in that case would you prefer to not exist in a world with rocks, trees, butterflies, or in one without?

Here the idea of a preference is obviously incoherent. Like many philosophical thought experiments the ‘Last Man Argument’ (the name comes from an earlier version) trades upon an impossibility or an illusion to convince you of its point (e.g. ‘imagine you are a bat,’ ‘suppose you know all there is to know about colour vision,’ ‘suppose you’ve memorized a program that is some human’s Turing Machine,’ etc.) Until a better argument is provided we should resist accepting a claim of universal intrinsic value that has the effect of giving the same moral status to humans and rocks – which is to say, no status at all.

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A Real Reason to Value Linguistic Diversity

May 7, 2017 – 10:17 pm

There’s been some discussion on other sites about whether we should regret the loss of small languages, and if so, why. Many of the usual points have been made about how change is not something that should be seen as bad just in itself, and we can’t expect to preserve language speakers in a cultural ghetto so that we can enjoy just knowing that their tiny language is being spoken while we engage the rest of the world in conversation in a more successful tongue. On the other hand people will claim that the lessening of diversity in the world is something to be regretted.

I tend to agree with all of the above, but I want to give a reason for preserving linguistic diversity that doesn’t get mentioned often enough. Languages are a very convenient way of looking at the way the mind works. And the larger the number of languages in the sample the less likely it is that characteristics of the mind will be extrapolated from merely contingent features of that sample. I am put in mind of an article I once read concerning the language of the Maricopa Indians of Arizona.

David Gil analysed the language [’Aristotle Goes to Arizona, and finds a language without “and”‘ in Zaefferer (ed.) (1991) Semantic Universals and Universal Semantics] and concluded that it lacks any coordinate construction even at its deepest level, and has, indeed, no syntactic category of coordinator. (I won’t bother describing this category here, it should be intuitively obvious what he’s talking about.) Approximate translation of English coordinated phrases is achieved in Maricopa by various means but these always involve a degree of subordination of one (English equivalent) phrase. In fact the basic difference is that Maricopa, like many other languages but to an extreme degree, tends to prefer subordination in its structures, whereas the Indo-European languages have a much flatter structure.

Some examples will show you what this means in practice. Here are just two ways the sentence ‘I saw John and Bill’ could be translated by a Maricopan.

[S: [NP: ][VP: [S: [NP: Johns][VP: [NP: Bill][V: udaavm (accompany)][V: ni’yuuk (see)]]]]

in which the closest thing to an ‘and’ is a verb ‘to accompany’, but the structure of the sentence is clearly not as we defined it to be for a coordinating construction because the elements are not directly dominated by the root node.

[S: [NP: ][VP: [S: [NP: Johns][NP: Bills][VP: mat teevm (be together)]][V: ni’yuuk (see)]]]

in which the closest thing to an ‘and’ is now a regular intransitive verb, but again the structure fails to be that of a coordinating construction because the conjunct elements are of category NP while the root node is of category S. In a coordinating construction recall that the category of the construction is the same as the category of its coordinated parts.

So what’s the importance of all this? Well if one has a theory – and it was popular at one stage – that LF is to be derived from S-Structure, then it strongly suggests that there is no coordinating structure in the LF of a Maricopa sentence; and similar considerations show that no analogue to LF with coordinators is derivable under the same constraints from any other accepted level of linguistic representation in the current model. Of course there are possible functions which could create coordinating structures from Maricopa S-structures, the fact that they would need to be used by any translator between Maricopa and English assures us of this, but that is not the same as claiming that those functions can be justified as transformations in the linguistic system itself. Moreover, if such transformations did apply the problem would then be to explain how monolingual Maricopa speakers came to acquire their rules of application, since there are no linguistic data available to that speaker which even hint at their existence.

And the importance of this is that if a language like Maricopa did not exist then it would have been unlikely that anyone would have proposed it as a possible language. In short, the store of languages is a set of experiments and data for our investigations into our language faculty, which is about the most essentially human of all our faculties. Fewer extant or recorded languages means less data about ourselves, means less access to the truth about ourselves.

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On Castro’s Resignation

May 7, 2017 – 10:11 pm

Well, no, not really. The title should really be something like ‘Thoughts on the Occasion of Castro’s Resignation;’ but then people might expect poetry. All I wish to do here is make some remarks with reference to a conversation that I had with a small group of graduate students a year or two ago in which Castro’s Cuba came up.

In that conversation I suffered through a series of fashionable leftist imbecilities while holding my tongue for the sake of good fellowship. (I had been warned previously about my ‘rudeness’ when I suggested to a graduate in ‘Peace Studies’ that her proposal to spend a year teaching ‘conflict resolution’ to children in Cambodia was a piece of ridiculous self-indulgence, misery tourism, patronising modern missionary work, of no earthy use to the Cambodians, and a transparent excuse for exotic adventures (Save Redfern first!)) Anyway, in the course of this conversation there was much said about the totalitarian horrors of Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s period of rule in Queensland. There was outrage at the corruption, the failure to enact decent welfare legislation, the bulldozing of ancient (well, old, anyway) landmarks in the dead of night, the control of the press through fear, and so on. The Joh regime was apparently an appalling thing that no right-minded person could defend, and could even justify massive protest to the level of revolution. Maybe so. I can’t judge whether these complaints are well-founded or not, since I wasn’t here, and no one’s interested now anyway. But I was surprised to hear just a few minutes later that Cuba has a much better health system than Australia, so Castro has to be admired for that. And, of course, for doing this in the face of a bullying superpower’s unjustifiable embargo. The claim is ludicrous in many ways, but that isn’t the point of this memoir. When I wondered, quietly and politely, whether he should really be forgiven for running a tropical gulag, imprisoning, librarians, murdering opponents, hiring his army out to the Soviet Union, oppressing even the sainted homosexuals, etc. just because he had given Cubans a good health system, the response was that, well, people will put up with a good deal of government misbehaviour if they can just be assured of the necessaries of life.

This logical blindness was so staggering to me that I was unable to formulate a polite reply. I think my offhand comment was that they weren’t so forgiving to Joh. Not that I think that they should have been – but, really, compare the two cases. I was reminded of a comment by John Derbyshire that captures one impression I took from that conversation perfectly:

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy. Won’t they ever learn? No, their stupidity is impenetrable. They will never learn.

The other impression I took (hardly a novel one) was that ‘the left’ will put up with an amazing amount of oppression of other people as long as it can be painted as twisting the tail of the Great Satan. That wouldn’t be so objectionable or dangerous in itself – ‘the right,’ for example, would admit that the comment “he may be a son of a bitch, but he’s ourson of a bitch” describes the motivation for much of the foreign policy that they approve. The problem with the left is that they just can’t be honest about this. Instead they have to twist their principles into a mess in order to justify their natural desire to support the enemy of their enemy. They must convince themselves that their partisanship is justified by something nobler and purer than that, because they are nobler and purer than that. It is almost inevitable that conceptual incoherence and practical incompetence will follow from such a practice; and this is what we see. Cuba isn’t even nearly the most egregious case. The very worst was the support of the Soviet Union or Maoist China; but the most pitiable is the current tendency of the left to associate itself with the resurgent Jihadist movements in Islam, treating them as if they were some sort of national liberation movement, or anti-imperialists, or anti-free traders, or what have you.

Further reading: Norm Geras ‘The Reductions of the Left’ Dissent, Winter, 2005.

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The Three State Solution

May 7, 2017 – 10:04 pm

When people say that they support an Arab state in the West Bank and Gaza that is ‘contiguous’ I wonder what they think that word means. How do they propose that the Gaza Strip is to become contiguous with the West Bank? Geography seems to be their enemy here, more than the Zionist Entity.

Anyway, it looks like the Gaza Strip has preemptively seceded from this intended state. This was entirely to be expected: the situation was always going to resemble Pakistan East and West more than Alaska and the lower 48. In fact, if the Israeli ‘Disengagement ‘ (should that project be taken up again) results in Israel retaining the Jordan valley and the borders of ‘Palestine’ following the proposed line of the separation barrier, that might create a situation in which the area about Hebron (south of J’lem) would seek to separate from the area north of Jerusalem.

During the period of German partition it was said by some that they so loved the idea of Germany that they would prefer to have two of them rather than just one. I wonder how much the people of the area love the idea of Palestine?

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Secret Lawyers’ Business

May 7, 2017 – 9:56 pm

On Wednesday (13/02/2008) Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made his famous Apology to the Stolen Generations – that is, to those Australian aboriginal children who were removed from their parents because of their aboriginality. The theory behind the term ‘Stolen Generations’ is that in doing so government agents were implementing a policy of the Australian government to eliminate the aboriginal race. The victims of this policy and their descendants continue to suffer from this removal to this day.

One would think that, this being the case, and the Apology constituting an apparent admission by the government that it is the case, there would be a clear moral argument for offering compensation for this damage, and that if it is not freely offered then a legal case could be mounted to compel compensation. Yet we are assured that no such compensation will be offered, and that we need not expect legal claims for compensation to be successful.

This assurance comes in two forms. In the first place, we are told that the Prime Minister sought and received legal advice on this matter before he made the Apology; and the clear implication is that the lawyers’ advice was that there is no reason to fear that compensation must necessarily follow from the Apology. At the moment we have no ability to judge the worth of that legal advice because the government has refused to make it public. Second, the assurance is sometimes given as a lesson from history. On ‘Insiders’ (ABC, 9am, 17/02/2008) Julia Gillard, seeking to reassure viewers on this matter, argued that similar apologies by state governments had not been followed by legal obligations for compensation being imposed on those governments. She did not, however, expand on why that might have been so.

We might note in this context that compensation claims have in fact been tested in the courts, and the judgement has been that they are without merit, for the very good reason that the courts could find no evidence that there was any such policy of racial elimination as the theory of the Stolen Generations supposes.

My guess is that the legal advice to the Government made note of this, and also gave strong grounds to believe that there never was such a policy at the federal level (whatever may have occurred at the state level.) No eliminationist policy would mean no Stolen Generation, which would mean no compensation for claimants on the basis of membership in that group. Now, on the one hand, that is good news for the federal budget, and for the actual moral standing of past Australian goverments and their agents; but on the other hand, it would rather spoil the effect of the Apology if it came to be known that the current government believed it was Apologizing for something that had never happened. In fact, if it was known that the government had deliberately and knowingly accepted on behalf of Australians the guilt for an attempted genocide that had not happened, the resentment of Australians at this slander might very well undo (and then some) any benefits that the symbolic action might have achieved.

If my guess is correct, therefore, we should not expect this advice to be made public any time soon.

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