Author Archives: Irfan Khawaja

Honking “Go” at a Dangerous Intersection (part 1)

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I think most people would agree that it’s not just wrong, but a rights violation, falsely to yell “fire” in a crowded theater. Both the claim and the slogan that goes with it come from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s opinion in the 1919 Supreme Court case, Schenck vs. United States. Why it’s a rights violation is less obvious than the fact that it is. I’ve seen libertarians try to explain why on the grounds that the person engaged in the yelling violates the property rights of the theater owners: he doesn’t own the theater, and violates the property rights of the owners in effect by speaking out of turn. But that can’t be right. I’d insist that a rights violation takes place even if the theater owner himself does the yelling, even if the ownership of the theater is disputed, and even if the theater’s current owner came to have legal title to the theater through malfeasance. It also takes place if the theater was “publicly owned,” and so, didn’t (in my view, at least) have a clear-cut owner. What’s rights violative is the speech act of falsely inducing a panic, regardless of who owns the place where the speech act takes place.

Someone’s falsely yelling “fire” in a crowded theater seems so unlikely an occurrence as to make the whole issue seem academic or legalistic. How often (one might ask) do rights violations of this kind really happen? How often do people falsely yell “fire” in a crowded theater or some equivalent? Actually, I think rights violations of the “falsely yelling fire” variety happen all the time—every day, thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of times a day. We don’t notice them, I suppose, because we tend to take them for granted, and we take them for granted because they don’t, overtly speaking, look like falsely yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. What I have in mind is the phenomenon that supplies the title of this post. Think about the asshole (and I’m afraid that’s the only word that fits) who honks his horn at you at a merge, or a yield, or a left turn at a traffic light, urging you into danger in order to suit his desire to get to his destination about 30 seconds faster than he might otherwise. Like the person yelling “fire,” the honking asshole wants to induce panic in you at your expense—or pressure or intimidate you into action—not necessarily for fun, but to save time on his commute.

Those of us who drive a lot in north Jersey encounter this phenomenon (and phenomena like it) every day, often twice a day—on the way to work, and back. Consider two examples, which took place at different but similar merges on my way to work last week.

(1) I was about to merge onto a ramp that leads to the Garden State Parkway. I confronted a yield sign, and a car was in fact coming my way, so I yielded to it. But the driver behind me thought I shouldn’t be yielding. Evidently, “yielding” was not part of her ontology. So she honked good and loud at me, urging me onto the ramp, and straight toward the oncoming car. Had I followed her “advice,” I would (with nearly 100% certainty) have hit the oncoming car, not that this seemed to matter to her. What mattered is that I had yielded to oncoming traffic, wasting a good three seconds of her precious time.

(2) I was about to merge onto Route 46 East. It was morning rush hour, and oncoming traffic coming down the highway was heavy. When it comes to merges of this kind (especially on Route 46), it’s often hard to gauge (and easy to miscalculate) how fast oncoming traffic is coming, partly because no one obeys the speed limit, and partly because the sight lines are terrible (you have to crane your head backward in a tortuous manner to be able to see oncoming traffic). I saw a car in the distance coming my way, and figured that it was both too close and coming too fast to permit a safe merge, so I decided to wait for it to go by before I merged onto the highway. Not good enough for the guy behind me, who obviously thought that I ought to adopt his danger- and speed-happy risk calculus, rush into the highway, and risk an accident so that he could get to his all-important destination twelve seconds faster than my driverly pusillanimity permitted.

As I said before, this sort of thing is commonplace in New Jersey.

Here’s my claim: if it’s a rights violation falsely to yell “fire” in a crowded theater, then episodes (1) and (2) above describe rights violations as well. They may not look like yelling fire in a crowded theater, but causally and normatively, they amount to the same thing. The honking of the horn in both cases is analogous to falsely yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. The danger into which the honker is urging me is analogous to the dangers created by a stampede in a crowded theater. (Incidentally, I don’t think it’s central to Holmes’s claim that the theater be crowded. A half-full theater might do just as well.)

There are differences between the cases, but I think the differences are relatively unimportant, normatively speaking. Honking is not literally a speech act, but it’s close enough to one. Honking is probably not as apt to induce a panicked response as falsely yelling “fire,” but it’s close enough. The person yelling “fire” is doing it out of malice or for fun, whereas the honker is honking out of impatience. But part of the motivation for impatience in the context of driving is the sense of pleasure that the impatient person gets at fast and reckless driving (cf. Plato’s Gorgias on this general phenomenon). When he honks at you, it’s not just because you’re taking up his time per se, but because you constitute an impediment to the literal speed rush he gets when he gets to drive without drivers like you around. So there may turn out to be a partial motivational overlap between the theater and traffic cases as well (not that that really matters to the essential issue).

I’m inclined to think that the probability of serious injury is greater in my examples than in the crowded theater. A panicked stampede is dangerous, but if we’re talking about movie theaters rather than stadiums, I don’t think it’s very likely to be fatal (though I’m guessing here; I don’t really know). By contrast, the traffic accidents I have in mind in (1) and (2) would very likely have been seriously injurious to someone, and could very easily have been fatal. In both the theater and traffic cases, we might perhaps want to put a bit more of a burden on the would-be victims than I so far have, demanding that they display a little more grace under pressure, e.g., checking to see whether there really is a fire in the theater case, or resisting the honker regardless of the pressure induced by the honking in the traffic cases. I’m willing to entertain the possibility that the victims’ panic in both cases is mildly culpable—a failure of independence under pressure. But I don’t think a finding of culpability would change the fact that what we have here are bona fide rights violations.

So I’d conclude that the theater and traffic cases are sufficiently similar to justify describing them as the same kind of act, giving them the same normative status, and (to some extent) treating them the same way. In part 2 of this post, I want to discuss some of the philosophical ramifications of this claim. One set has to do with the relation between egoism and asshole behavior. Another set has to do with rights-violations and law enforcement. A third set has to do with traffic as a source of moral knowledge.

Postscript, February 14, 2015: This article offers useful substantiation of the attitude I describe in the text, though in a slightly different context–dangerous railroad crossings in the New York-New Jersey metro area. This brief passage tells the whole tale:

The less expensive safety measures — automatic gates, lights, bells and signs — are largely in place in the New York region. A challenge is creating crossings that can overcome the lesser impulses of human nature in a part of the country where many people do not see patience as a virtue.

In Brentwood, N.Y., on Monday, a couple on foot watched as the safety gate at the Washington Avenue crossing, one of the most dangerous in the region, lowered in front of them, its bells sounding and lights flashing. After one Long Island Rail Road train passed through, heading east, the man and woman ducked underneath the crossing gate. The man glanced toward the train receding in the distance and suddenly jumped back.

“There’s another train coming!” he yelled.

The woman did not break stride as a westbound train barreled through, missing her by a few feet. “I’ve lived here long enough to know when not to do it,” said the woman, who declined to give her name. ….

“I sit there in awe, I hold my breath watching them. I think, ‘Oh my God, these people are risking too much,’ ” said Cecilia Vaughn, 48, a medical assistant who works near the Washington Avenue crossing.

It’s bad enough when they risk too much with their own lives. But the truth is that they have no compunction risking too much with the lives of others. I sometimes wonder whether the very dangerousness of our roads facilitates risk-impulsiveness: like the soldier who hasn’t yet been shot on the battlefield, the driver or pedestrian who hasn’t yet been killed on the road regards herself as invincible exception to the laws of physics–until the laws of physics demonstrate otherwise.

Postscript 2, February 20, 2015: In case you thought I was exaggerating about New Jersey’s roads and traffic, here’s more substantiation of my claims, from an aptly-titled series of articles from the January 2015 issue of New Jersey Monthly: “Why New Jersey’s Roads Suck.” Unfortunately it’s behind a paywall, but a very informative read if you’re willing to plunk the $5 to read it. I highly advise reading it, if you’re from the NY-NJ Metro area: very gratifying to have one’s beliefs validated!

A thought on Gaza

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I haven’t said very much here of a direct nature about Gaza. That’s partly because I know less about Gaza than I do about the West Bank, and partly because I think there’s less to say about what’s been happening lately in Gaza than what’s been happening for awhile in the West Bank. But abstracting from questions of detail, I think there’s something to say, so I might as well say it. If I’m missing something, and being uncharitable to Hamas, someone can explain that to me, but as things stand, I don’t see any reasons for charity toward them.

I was having a conversation about Gaza the other day with my father and one of my cousins. My father and I are Pakistani-American; my cousin is Pakistani. All three of us have a great deal of sympathy for the cause of Palestinian rights, but none of us has any sympathy for Hamas. We’re all fairly argumentative people, but we quickly came to the following consensus about events in Gaza:

1. It makes no sense for Hamas to be officially at war with Israel and then to complain when Israel blockades Gaza. (And sophistry of this variety doesn’t help.)

2. It makes no sense for Hamas to attack Israel and not expect to be attacked in return.

3. It makes no sense for Hamas to attack Israel’s civilians and then complain to the world about its own civilian casualties at Israeli hands. (On the whole, I agree with the Israeli position that Hamas is using its civilian population as innocent shields, but this is a complex issue that requires separate treatment.)

4. Displays of pro-Hamas sympathy of the kind described in this article should elicit our criticism and rejection, not excuses or encouragement.

5. Finally, there’s a good analogy to be made between what Hamas is doing in Gaza and what the Pakistani Taliban is doing in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and the tribal agencies in Pakistan. There’s also a good analogy to be made between what the Israeli government has been forced to do in Gaza and what the Pakistani government has been forced to do in Pakistan’s northwest. The preceding analogies are driven by the sad fact that there’s a good analogy to be made between Hamas and the Taliban.

By the way, the consensus view of the three of us—including my Pakistani cousin, who lives in Pakistan—was that military action (ideally in the form of drone strikes) is the only way to deal with, i.e., defeat, the Pakistani Taliban. I’d like to think that Hamas is somewhat more reasonable than the Pakistani Taliban, and can come to a more reasonable settlement with Israel than the Taliban has mustered with Pakistan. But I wouldn’t bet on it. (Incidentally, could I have written the preceding sentence in Taliban- or Hamas-controlled territory without inviting the Islamic police to arrest me for suborning a violation of sharia? “Betting,” after all, is a paradigmatically unIslamic activity, and as its charter makes clear, Hamas believes that Palestine is to be ruled as an Islamic waqf under sharia. Thanks, but no thanks.)

We didn’t happen to discuss this, but like it or not, there’s a bit of an analogy to be made between Israel and Pakistan. The one is a Jewish state that aspires to be the moral equivalent of a secular republic while insisting, quixotically, on retaining its Jewish character. The other is an Islamic state that aspires to be the moral equivalent of a secular republic while insisting, quixotically, on retaining its Islamic character. Neither state professes to see any contradiction in doing so. Each state found it expedient a few decades back to support the enemy of its enemy—Hamas against Fatah in the case of Israel, and the proto-Taliban mujahidin against the USSR and India in the case of Pakistan. Both now find themselves on the receiving end of the depredations of the theocratic monsters they themselves helped create. Maybe one lesson here is that in the long-run, it doesn’t pay to outsmart oneself like that.

There’s a lesson here for the United States, as well. An interventionist foreign policy has a tendency to induce its practitioners to promote their “interests” abroad by supporting the enemies of their enemies, in the hope that doing so will induce one enemy to destroy the other and enable a kind of defense-in-depth-on-the-cheap. Such policies seem clever until the enemies of one’s enemies become one’s plain old enemies (often in alliance with yesteryear’s enemies, on the premise that those erstwhile enemies can now be treated as friends because they’re the enemies of one’s current enemies). At that point, of course, the policies come to seem irrationally self-defeating. One possible lesson is to stop intervening everywhere, and stop insisting on a conception of one’s  “interests” that requires a defense in depth. Perhaps a non-interventionist policy that seems fairly clever in the here and now might, with the passage of time, retain its aura of cleverness in the future, and save us from a lot of trouble.

PS., For good non-mainstream coverage of the Israel/Palestine dispute, I’d recommend Ibishblog, the blog of Hussein Ibish, a Senior Fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine. I don’t always agree with what he has to say (he probably wouldn’t entirely agree with what I’ve just said above), but this article and this one say things that you might not have expected to hear from a partisan of the Palestinian cause, and aren’t likely to hear in the mainstream press.

SFL, Partisanship, and Candor: The Case of the Hertog Foundation

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Students for Liberty has a new blog post up advertising Economic Liberty Seminars in NYC and Jerusalem, “sponsored by the Hertog Foundation, an educational philanthrophy in New York.” Three anomalies should stand out about this post.

The first is that unlike most posts on SFL’s blog, it’s unsigned. The author is listed as “Guest Author,” with no further identifying information.

The second is the sheer vagueness of the subject matter to be discussed at the seminars. The reader is told that the seminars will explore “fundamental questions of capitalism and democracy,” and “the relationship of political and economic liberty.” One obvious application of these topics to the Israeli context would be a discussion of the justifiability of Israel’s occupation and settlement of the West Bank (or for that matter, its blockade of Gaza). But there is no mention whatsoever of those obvious topics. In fact, reading the advertisement, and clicking back through material on the Tikvah Center and Hertog Foundation, one is led to wonder whether the organizers of the seminar believe that Palestinian Arabs exist, and if so, whether their situation matters enough to be named and discussed in any explicit way.

This is a point worth bearing in mind, incidentally, the next time some defender of Israel gets in your face about Israel’s commitment to the equal rights of its Arab and Jewish citizens or denizens. I don’t doubt that many Israelis have some such commitment. The interesting question is whether Israel’s American defenders–and in particular, its supposedly free market defenders–have the relevant commitment. I doubt it, and if you wonder why, I suggest looking through the websites of the Hertog Foundation and Tikvah Center with the following question in mind: is the intellectual agenda expressed by these organizations one that shows active engagement with the need to come to terms with Israel’s Palestinian Arabs, or is it one that demonstrates a desperate desire to ignore their existence?

A third anomaly, related to the second: If you look at the personnel and activities of the Hertog Foundation and Tikvah Center, and you’re at all familiar with how the polemical end of the Arab/Israeli dispute works, you’ll probably infer that the Foundation and Center are academic branches of what Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer have described as “the Israel lobby.” But if you look for any candid, explicit acknowledgement of this obvious fact, you will not find it. (Nor will you find any clear indication of how exactly the two organizations are funded, despite the sheer abundance of funding on offer in this, a time of “retrenchment” in post-financial crisis academia.)

What you will find instead is a slick, skillful, disingenuous exercise in plausible deniability. Every activity sponsored by the Foundation and engaged in by the Center has the same political orientation. Virtually every person associated with them is an active partisan on one side of the debate. Few if any Arabs are involved in the organizations’ activities  (I didn’t see a single one; I’m just hedging in case I missed any), including its Fellows Program. But if you straightforwardly ask the question, “So are these organizations just the academic expression of a lobbying enterprise for a foreign government?” not only will you not find the answer, but you’ll likely be accused of anti-Semitism. And if you wonder why NYU houses such an outfit, people will accuse you of the conspiratorial belief that “Jews control academia,” and sarcastically start invoking the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Before anyone does that, I should hasten to add that the problem here is hardly confined to pro-Israel organizations in American universities.  It extends to supposedly academic centers for the study of Islamic civilization funded by Saudi money, and essentially partisan outfits within universities whose purpose is advocacy for various Third World causes under outward cover of academic neutrality or multiculturalism. It’s just that those things don’t typically show up at SFL.

One wonders why not. After all, if pro-Israeli advocacy is an expression of free-market capitalism, why not pro-Egyptian, pro-Tunisian, pro-Qatari, or pro-Islamic? Better yet, why not advertise pro-Arab and pro-Islamic organizations that flaunt their pro-Arab and pro-Islamic credentials, that pretend that there are no non-Arab or non-Muslim minorities in Arab/Muslim countries, and that interpret “freedom” and “capitalism” to mean “freedom for Arabs” or “capitalism for Muslims?” Finally, why not advertise organizations discreetly geared to an Arab/Muslim membership, but that cannot admit out loud that that is their self-conception?

A couple of years ago, I tried to call the bluff of such an organization–the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies–by sending a painstakingly constructed application for their annual Israel program. I didn’t get in, but I made sure to be interviewed, and spoke my mind in the interview. (As I said, I didn’t get in.) That’s my suggestion here, as it is for dealing with any such partisan organization with academic pretensions, be it pro-Israeli, pro-Muslim, pro-Arab, pro-Pakistani, left-wing social justice oriented, libertarian, or Objectivist. Take their rhetoric literally and at face value and insist that they live up to it. The results will be instructive, but don’t expect them to be pleasant.

Miscellany: Forthcoming Reason Papers; Joe Duarte’s new blog

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I’ve been a little slow (and will be a little slow) on the blogging front because Carrie-Ann Biondi, Kate Herrick, and I are in the middle of proofreading the forthcoming issue of Reason Papers (vol 36, number 1). It looks like the issue will be going live on the RP site on August 18. We were supposed to get the issue out last fall, but events conspired against us, so it’s taken us until now.

There’s a lot of good stuff in the issue. I myself particularly liked the juxtaposition of a symposium on Robert Talisse’s Democracy and Moral Conflict and a retrospective symposium on Waco. Talisse is a phenomenally interesting and productive philosopher, and a great guy to boot, and I think his book is a must-read.

Unfortunately, the Waco symposium has come out a year late, so that it’s inadvertently a 21-year rather than 20-year retrospective on the event. And disappointingly, two symposiasts–Kenneth G. C. Newport and Jayne Seminaire Docherty–had to pull out before they sent us submissions. I haven’t yet read Docherty’s book on Waco, but I find her work extremely interesting; I’ve read Newport’s book, and it’s superb. (I had also invited John Danforth and Ronald Noble to write for us, but both declined. Noble is the author of the Treasury Dept report on Waco, and Danforth wrote an independent report on Waco in the year 2000.) In any case, the five remaining symposiasts–Michael Barkun, Paul Blackman, David Kopel, Dick Reavis, and I–have some provocative things to say.

Talisse and Waco aside, I got a lot out of reading David Riesbeck’s review of Eugene Garver’s Aristotle’s Politics: Living Well and Living Together, and Danny Frederick’s review of Mark Friedman’s Nozick’s Libertarian Project: An Elaboration and Defense. But more on all this when the issue actually comes out.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for something else to read online, try Joe Duarte’s new website and blog, Social Psychology and Scientific Validity. Joe and I met for the first time last year at the TAS Graduate Seminar, where he attacked all the philosophers there for being so anti-empirical. I guess I took his criticisms to heart because just a few months after I met him, I decided to enter a master’s program in counseling psychology, in part to become more empirical about ethics–by remedying my embarrassing ignorance of social science, among other things. As I put it in my personal statement, I decided to pursue the degree because I thought it was about time that I learned something about people, something that a PhD in philosophy hadn’t really taught me.

Anyway, Joe seems to have started his blog just a few weeks before I started this one, and it’s well worth reading: he’s more polemical and opinionated than I am, and that’s saying something. He’s also just published a paper (as first author) in Behavioral and Brain Science alongside Jonathan Haidt, Philip Tetlock, and several others. That’s an ass-kicking achievement, if you don’t mind my putting it that way, and one that’s bound to have some impact, so I’d advise taking a look.

The power of philosophy: Hamas, Gaza, Human Shields, and Hypocrisy

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The front page of this morning’s New York Times has a thought-provoking article on Gaza, “Civilians as Human Shields? Gaza War Intensifies Debate.” The issues discussed in it are difficult and complex, and the article as a whole is well worth reading. There’s a vast literature out there on human shields, as well as on Gazans-as-human-shields, and it would be silly to try to discuss any large swatch of it in a single blog post. Just two quick observations, then:

(1) People sometimes cavalierly claim that philosophy is irrelevant to “real life,” but this article is a vivid, if unintentional, refutation of that claim. For better or worse, the language of “human shields” (or innocent shields, or innocent threats, etc.) is now all-but-taken for granted in discussions of the ethics of warfare, as is the presumption of civilian or non-combatant immunity from military attack. That wasn’t always the case. Moral philosophers made it the case by making the relevant arguments in “obscure” books and journals, and lawyers followed their lead and institutionalized the philosophers’ claims. Military commanders eventually made compliance with those philosophical and legal principles a matter of “honor.” But the bottom line is that the terms of today’s debates about the war in Gaza were set by the writings of yesterday’s philosophers– specifically by the writings of the generation of philosophers (Walzer, Nozick, Nagel, Judith Thomson, etc.) who achieved academic prominence during the worst days of the Vietnam War, and turned to philosophy as a means of processing what they observed. If that doesn’t count as evidence of philosophy’s relevance to “the real world,” then questions of evidence are themselves irrelevant to the discussion.

(2) In a related article, an unnamed State Department official is quoted as saying the following:

 “What we’re trying to figure out is how we can get to the point where the violence can stop and these bigger key issues can be addressed over the longer term,” said a senior State Department official, who asked not to be identified in keeping with the agency’s protocol for briefing reporters.

The biggest key issue is the Israeli occupation and settlement of the West Bank. But American credibility on that issue can be gauged by the fact that the last time it was called on publicly to re-affirm its own assessment of Israel’s settlement policies–at the UN, in 2011–it refused to do so. Putting the point less charitably, it couldn’t summon up the integrity or courage to do so. The US has consistently claimed to be opposed to Israel’s settlement policies but has just as consistently refused to condition support for Israel on Israel’s ending that policy. And so the policy has continued, with pro forma American disapproval, and de facto American support. Any intelligent person would have to wonder how long such a charade could go on.

After almost five decades of this pattern, the State Department wants us–and the Palestinians, and the rest of the world–to take the United States’s supposed interest in “bigger issues” on faith. But fideism doesn’t work in politics anymore than it works anywhere else. Fideism, secular and religious, is after all one of the “root causes” of the Arab-Israeli conflict as such. What makes the US a dishonest broker in the dispute–not that it has to be a broker at all–is its equivocal attitude toward faith-based politics. Unfortunately, that attitude has its basis in philosophy as well–yet another confirmation of philosophy’s relevance to “real life” and of its power over people oblivious to the power it has.

“Pairwise”

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It belatedly occurs to me that my last post misuses the term “pairwise.” A pairwise comparison is a comparison of one pair of things as against another pair, not a comparison of two items that are paired against one another. I was using “pairwise” to mean the latter, but that’s a mistake.

Incidentally, I haven’t set out a formal list of “policies” for this blog, but one of them will surely have to be that I promise not to make substantive changes to a post after the post has been published. I will, however, correct copy-edit level mistakes, as long as they don’t substantively change the point I was originally making. I guess you might object that any change, even at the level of grammar or punctuation, affects some substantive point somehow, but I’d respond that the changes I regard as “copy-edit level” are too minute to count as substantive in the relevant sense. They improve the clarity of the original argument without changing its content. Anyway, when in doubt (when I’m in doubt), I’ll tell you that I’ve made a change after I hit “Publish.”

I take it that the preceding policy differs from what one finds at some other blogs, where bloggers routinely modify their claims in response to criticisms, don’t inform their readers that they’re doing so, and then proceed as though the criticisms in question were misplaced. That’s obviously dishonest, and I’m surprised that readers are less critical of the practice than one might expect them to be.

Pairwise civilizational verdicts and the Arab Israeli conflict: a sketch

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I recently had a “debate” about Israel and Palestine at the Bleeding Heart Libertarian website. I wrote my post at the suggestion of Roderick Long (Auburn) in response to one by Fernando Teson (Florida State University College of Law); Long posted it as a guest blog at BHL as well as at his own website and at that of the Center for a Stateless Society. (I’m not an anarchist myself, but I occasionally consort with anarchists, e.g., when they post my decidedly non-anarchist writings on their blogs. By the way–thanks, Roderick!)

One topic that repeatedly came up in the debate, and that repeatedly comes up in debates like this, is what I call inferential license via pairwise civilizational verdict. The basic idea is this: you’re trying (in moral terms) to adjudicate a dispute between two parties, X and Y–where “X” and “Y” are typically distinct “cultures” or “societies,” and in this post-Huntingtonian-but-still-Huntingtonian age, therefore belong to different “civilizations.” In order to adjudicate the dispute, however, you assume that you’ve got to begin with premises that express a kind of global moral verdict on each society. That’s the pairwise civilizational verdict. Once you have that verdict in hand, you can then use it to regulate whatever inferences you want to make about the dispute. If, for instance, you find that X is morally superior to Y, you then systematically give greater weight to X’s claims in the dispute, and greater plausibility to evidence that seems to favor those claims. That’s the inferential license. Put the two things together, and you have a classic recipe for coherence-without-input-from-the-world. In other words, you have a recipe for generating a coherent (or apparently coherent) grievance-narrative that feeds all claims about the conflict through a filter that favors one side in the conflict. As I’ve argued elsewhere (but in somewhat different terms), that’s fundamentally what I think the Arab/Israeli conflict is.

There are at least two sets of questions lurking here. One concerns the legitimacy of making pairwise civilizational verdicts as such. Roughly: are they legitimate, and if so, how or why? Another concerns the legitimacy of using such verdicts to regulate disputes. Supposing that they are legitimate, should one use them to regulate particular disputes; if so, how and why?

Here’s a very quick thought on the first set of questions (the “are they legitimate” questions). It seems to me that the idea of a pairwise civilizational (or cultural or societal or national or ethno-national) verdict is a highly equivocal one. Suppose that I say that culture X is superior to culture Y. The claim should provoke some obvious preliminary queries. For one thing, we have to be clear about the values for “X” and “Y”: what exactly are they, what are the truth conditions for claims about “them,” and how do we justify those claims? They also have to be comparable entities; we can’t be engaged in the moral equivalent of comparing apples and frog’s legs. Finally, we have to know how defeasible they are. How many exceptions (or what kind of exception) would defeat a generalized verdict about the superiority of one culture to another?

Given that (which is a lot to give), the “X is superior to Y” claim is ambiguous as between any of the following six claims:

1. The norms we associate with X are superior to those we associate with Y (not that we have any empirical evidence of causal connection; we’re going by associations).
2. The norms expressed by X are superior to those expressed by Y (assuming we have a way of identifying when a norm is expressive of a culture).
3. The political regime of X is superior to the political regime of Y, and superiority of political regime reflects superiority of culture.
4. The average citizen/denizen of X is morally superior to the average citizen/denizen of Y.
5. More of the citizens/denizens of X are morally superior to more of the citizens/denizens of Y.
6. The worst aspects of X are not as bad as the worst aspects of Y.
This isn’t the place for a full “chisholming” of these claims, but I think they require chisholming before anyone can be very confident about the legitimacy of any particular pairwise verdict. I also think that the more chisholming they undergo, the more problematic the overall strategy will come to seem. I don’t mean to suggest that pairwise cultural or civilizational comparisons are always or necessarily wrong or unjustified. I just think they’re more complicated than some overly gung-ho moral realists (or ethno-national tribalists) have realized.
(Thanks to David Bernstein, Mark Friedman, Sergio Mendez, Alice Raizel, and Michael Young for inspiring this comment, in some cases by exemplifying the confusions I’m implicitly criticizing.)

Sari Nusseibeh’s Retirement at Al Quds University

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My friend and colleague Sari Nusseibeh recently announced his retirement as President of Al Quds University in Jerusalem. (He was also one of the University’s co-founders, and teaches in the Department of Philosophy.) I was Sari’s guest at Al Quds last summer, where I was invited to give three lectures on topics in political philosophy of relevance to the Arab-Israeli dispute. With Sari’s help, I also got comprehensive political tours of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, did some sightseeing, went swimming in the hottest swimming pool I’ve ever experienced, and drank some of the best tea I’ve ever tasted. It was the experience of a lifetime for me, and I owe Sari (and his colleagues) a debt of gratitude for it that I can’t imagine ever being able to repay. (I also owe my Felician College colleague Fahmi Abboushi for putting me in touch with Sari on the occasion of Reason Papers’s 2012 symposium on Sari’s book, What Is a Palestinian State Worth?)

It’s remarkable that while here in North America, academics are bemoaning the death of the humanities and of the malaise of academia generally, Sari managed in a few decades to build a major university essentially from scratch–in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. I couldn’t help but be reminded of Booker T. Washington’s founding the Tuskegee Institute–I actually gifted Sari a copy of Up from Slavery–but on a grander scale. When I’m tempted to complain about academic life at home, I find myself thinking about what Sari has managed to do at Al Quds, and stop. Times may be tough for small liberal arts colleges in the US, but at least we don’t operate under the conditions of a military-bureaucratic occupation (or for that matter, the relentless anti-intellectual pressures exerted by religious fundamentalists).

Sari has narrated his own story better than anyone can, but I didn’t want to let the moment go by without offering a (non-alcoholic) toast in tribute to what he’s accomplished so far. The next time you confront someone who derides philosophy as a pie-in-the-sky endeavor, direct them to the life and work of Sari Nusseibeh. Like Socrates, he’s managed in theory and practice to bring philosophy down to earth–and at the center of life, where it belongs.

The Objectivist movement: a repudiation

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It’s probably obvious to anyone who’s Googled me that I have a more-than-passing interest in the ideas of Ayn Rand. If you’ve noticed that much, you’ve probably noticed that I take Rand seriously, am highly influenced by her, and agree with a lot of things she said. I don’t any longer know whether my agreements with Rand qualify me as an “Objectivist,” but they’re substantial enough to be unusual among academic philosophers.

In my view, Rand’s best ideas are to be found in what she wrote about epistemology and in the more abstract parts of her work on moral psychology, ethics, and aesthetics. Those parts of Rand strike me as deeper and more insightful than most of what I’ve encountered in analytic philosophy. But there are plenty of things in Rand and in her followers that strike me as weak and ill-argued. Apart from some suggestive remarks on causality and free will, I don’t think that Objectivism has a well-developed metaphysics, and ironically–despite its widespread notoriety–Objectivism’s political philosophy is to my mind, its weakest and least developed feature. In any case, the closer to the “ground” one gets–that is, to concrete, “applied” issues in ethics, politics, and aesthetics–the more problematic I think Rand’s views become. Frankly, some of her political views seem to me to border on insanity, and many of her aesthetic views are idiosyncratic and ill-argued, to say the least.

Of course, the same might be said of Nietzsche, Sartre, or Wittgenstein–which has never deterred philosophers from expressing enthusiasm for their work. Academic philosophers suffer from a rather strange double standard in this respect when it comes to Rand. People who haven’t read Rand feel free to dismiss her on the basis of vague rumors about what they think she said–and yet no one could legitimately dismiss Nietzsche, Sartre, or Wittgenstein even by offering up direct quotations of some of the utterly ridiculous things they actually said. It’s perfectly possible, after all, for a philosopher to have astute or even brilliant things to say in one domain, and to offer up rubbish in another. In fact, it happens all the time. Anyway, that–the brilliant/rubbish interpretation–happens to be my view of Rand. (I like Rand’s novels, but also have mixed feelings about them, and ultimately end up agreeing, in different ways, with both their most fervent enthusiasts and their most vehement critics.)

On the whole, I would dispute the idea that Rand left us a worked-out “system,” or that her followers have produced one. As I see it, what she left is a series of astute, under-appreciated, and ill-understood philosophical observations awaiting further development by competent philosophers. On this view, it’s premature to describe “Objectivism” as either true or false, since more of “it” exists in potentia than in actuality. (Ironically, Objectivism currently lacks the resources to spell out the latter insight, since it has no worked-out account of the metaphysics of potentiality and actuality.)

Having said that, my main purpose in writing this post is less to clarify my philosophical views on Objectivism than to issue a public repudiation of the Objectivist movement. A “public repudiation” might well sound self-serving or narcissistic to some ears, as though I regarded what I said in a blog post as making some major difference to the prospects of the movement. Since I know that it won’t, that isn’t my aim. Frankly, I’m not all that concerned about or interested in the “prospects of the Objectivist movement.” What I’m concerned about, given my evident interest in Rand, is the possibility of my being associated with it.

Depending on how you count them, the Objectivist movement has three or four institutional vehicles–the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI), the Anthem Foundation, the Ayn Rand Society (ARS), and The Atlas Society (TAS) (previously the Institute for Objectivist Studies, then The Objectivist Center). Carrie-Ann Biondi and I briefly ran something we called the Institute for Objectivist Studies (IOS), which we conceived of as a successor to the original IOS (founded in 1990). Our IOS lasted seven or eight months, from March until October 2013. I’ve always kept my distance from ARI and Anthem, but was a dues-paying member of ARS from the early 1990s until 2012, and had an on-again, off-again relationship with TAS, most actively between 1991-1994, and then for one-year stints in 1997 and parts of 2012-2013. (The latter relationship is now permanently “off.”)

I won’t bother to rehearse all of the details involving the similarities, differences, and histories of the four institutions. Suffice it to say that I regard all of them as morally corrupt, and regard the very idea of an “Objectivist movement” as a pointless (and pernicious) waste of time. I’ve expressed my opposition to the idea of an Objectivist movement here. My objections to each of the four Objectivist institutions are scattered on websites across the Internet. I may bring them together some day and house them in one place, but the basic objection can be put in a few sentences: in my experience, none of the four Objectivist institutions I’ve mentioned is committed to an honest conception of intellectual inquiry. Some of them wear more impressive academic garb than others, but all of them operate within a “movement” mentality that relies on heavy doses of group-think, dogmatism, and on occasion, all-out intellectual dishonesty. A judicious person would think long and hard before accepting an invitation from any of them. Ultimately, I don’t think a judicious person would accept such an invitation at all.

This isn’t the place to make a full case against the Objectivist movement. Not having done so, I can’t claim to have convinced you of my belief in its problematic features. Having distanced myself from it, all I can do here is to underscore the need for caution–even outright suspicion–in dealing with it. As most people already know, the Objectivist movement has a bad reputation. I would just add that most of that reputation is well- earned and well-justified. My advice: do some assiduous research before you deal with it, and you’ll come to the same conclusion on your own. (And, to paraphrase Philip Larkin, if you’re already in the movement, get out while you can.) Meanwhile, caveat emptor. Let the would-be buyer beware.

A founding act of theft

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I’m going to borrow or steal my first couple of posts from my Academia website. I started blogging there about a month ago, but found the platform hard to use for blogging purposes, and don’t in any case want to clutter up that particular page with blog posts. So the three posts that follow this one are the first few I wrote there in June and July 2014.