The Free Thinker

"A World Without Barriers"

"Jesus was a refugee, pope says on world migration day" (Catholic News Service, 1/18/11, via Brothers Judd):

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Jesus was a refugee -- a fact that should be remembered as societies deal with modern issues of emigration and immigration, Pope Benedict XVI said.

"Migration today sometimes is voluntary and at other times, unfortunately, is forced by wars or persecution, often in dramatic conditions," the pope said Jan. 16. From its very beginnings, the church has taken an interest in these situations, he said.

"The parents of Jesus had to flee their own land and take refuge in Egypt, in order to save the life of their child: the Messiah, the son of God, was a refugee," he said.

Throughout the centuries, he said, Christian populations have at times suffered the necessity to leave their homelands, impoverishing the countries where they and their ancestors had lived.

On the other hand, the pope said, the voluntary migration of Christians through the ages has increased the church's missionary dynamism and ensured that the witness of faith reaches new frontiers.

The pope made the remarks at the Vatican on a day that was celebrated in most countries as the World Day for Migrants and Refugees. Late last year, he issued a message on the theme of this year's celebration, "One Human Family."

The pope said he wanted his message to underline that in the church's vision, human migration has a unifying goal: to form a single human family that is enriched by differences but that lives without barriers.

Exactly, well said. I was thinking about the state of the immigration debate on this blog up till now. Tom and Nato mostly agree with me. Dissent has come from JM, MS, and SDS.

SDS seems mainly concerned that he perceived in me a judgmental attitude towards advocates of migration restrictions. It is never amiss to be told to love the sinner while hating the sin, for even if one has not fallen into hating the sinner, one may succumb to that temptation at any moment, and it is good to be warned. However, SDS's main grounds for claiming that I had fallen into it was my use of historical analogies that compared advocates of migration restrictions to fascists and to the slaveowning antebellum South. The problem with this line of argument is that if to compare nativists to fascists or slaveowning Southerners is to "judge their hearts," presumably the hearts of fascists and slaveowning Southerners have already been judged. And not only would that be contrary to "judge not that ye be not judged" and "hate the sin but love the sinner," but it would impoverish our historical understanding of fascists and antebellum Southerners if we simply "explained" their beliefs and behavior by saying that they were evil and we are not. I think we should recognize that we are not immune to letting veneration of the state blind us to the moral law; to desiring order more than our own freedom and especially that of others; to letting our perceived economic dependence on a system induce us to condone its violations of natural rights, in a spirit of cynical "realism." Americans are prone to feel that, because our country has historically behaved morally better than other great powers, that moral superiority is a sort of birthright. It is not that; it depends on our actions; and inasmuch as we imitate one of the most infamous practices of slavery by separating families by force...

Using Census data and figures released by the Pew Hispanic Center, the report estimates that just over 1 million family members have been separated from their loved ones by... deportations.

we risk forfeiting our moral superiority to societies which we view as cautionary tales.

JM offered the widest range of arguments against my positions, some of them monstrously bad. Among them was the worst, logically and morally, of all the arguments made against illegal immigration, namely the confusion of property with sovereignty, as if the entire territory of the United States were the private property of the US government, and for unauthorized foreigners to enter is some kind of trespassing. This is an argument worthy of pharaonic Egypt, to accept which is to repudiate in its entirety the heritage of liberty, which views man as a rational being with rights, and government as based on consent of the governed, and to make us all the slaves of the state. She also hinted at paternalistic arguments, suggesting that maybe not all those who say they would like to come to America would really benefit by coming. The idea that it is for the benefit of migrants that the migration decision be taken away from them and put in the hands of a State Department bureaucrat, who is not only not adequately incentivized to decide for the desiring migrant's good, but is not even trying to do so, is so absurd that one is reluctant to bring in the fact that most migrants to the US enjoy large income gains, lest by mentioning empirical evidence one seems wrongly to concede that the argument has enough prima facie validity not to be rejected at once. I was also struck by JM's claim that my advocacy of policies that don't involve separating families by force was an unrealistic desideratum, and she used the example of war. Now, first of all, JM may not be aware of this, but the United States does not practice conscription, so a polity that does not separate families by force in order to staff its armed forces is not only realistic, but a realized fact. Second, it might be appropriate to resort to a measure in emergencies when the survival of a society is threatened by a violent assault, but intolerable to make that measure a part of one's everyday policies. Third, even conscription has traditionally separated only fathers from their offspring by force, not mothers, and this I think makes a big difference, since the mother-and-child bond seems especially intimate and sacred. Slavery and migration restrictions, by contrast, will even separate a mother from her child. It is probably quite possible to have a society which never severs that bond, at least when the mother has not committed a crime; at any rate, we have to try. I recall another disappointing bit of sophistry from JM. I was arguing that migration restrictions are unique to our time, that comprehensive migration controls were never attempted before the 20th century, and certainly did not exist in the era she tends to admire, though of course travel was dangerous then and some were better able to engage in it than others. She said that some people could travel, it depended on who you were, just like today. She somehow glossed over this, I can't remember the exact artful formulation she used, but it was a bit like arguing that there is nothing unique about slavery, because there is always work to be done, and people can't be completely equal. (I remember she also once made the bizarre suggestion that my position on immigration is "defeasible pacifism." As it isn't any kind of pacifism-- not a general rejection of state violence; not a rejection of just war-- I can't make head or tail of this one.)

However, there was one argument that JM made which I found extremely interesting. Both JM and MS have often used "community" as a slogan with which to argue against open borders. This is a seeming nonsequitur, since (a) migration restrictions constantly divide communities, and/or prevent their formation, since actual and potential communities (including families!) regularly cross borders and are forcibly separated by migration restrictions, while on the other hand (b) how migration restrictions could possibly contribute to "community" even among native and naturalized US citizens is unclear, since the crossing of the Rio Grande by an illegal immigrant would seem to have no effect on the love and friendship and trust that any particular Americans have for each other. By pressing JM hard with this argument I provoked a very intriguing glimpse of the conception that might underlie this argument. From what I remember (it would take a while to find it), JM said that people need not only food, shelter, etc., but also community, friends, and that if everyone is friends with their neighbors then everyone has friends. It is a sort of social safety net in community: let everyone have, and fulfill, a moral obligation to know their neighbors, and while some people may have many more friends than others, yet no one will be completely friendless.

If this argument is accepted, there is a fairly plausible case for some kind of migration restrictions, because it might be necessary to ensure that one's neighbors are the kind of people one can make friends with, e.g., that they speak English, and have some degree of cultural similarity. The argument could be used even more plausibly to support some kind of domestic segregation, but I don't say that to delegitimize it. I would actually be very interested to see where a serious and consistent application of the argument that coercion is justified as a means of ensuring that people know their neighbors would lead. However-- and it's odd that JM doesn't seem to have seen this-- this is not at all a defense of the status quo, because in fact, nowadays hardly anyone seems to know their neighbors. I was particularly struck by this a few years ago when I visited a friend of mine in Louisville, KY, who is very community-oriented. He's choir director of the church, he's president of the local Hibernian Club (an Irish-American organization) and organizes the annual St. Patrick's Day parade, he keeps in close touch with many friends from Notre Dame, he grew up in Louisville and moved back to his home town. And we were having a conversation about community and the theme of how people don't know their neighbors anymore, and he said that he thought about that too, but that even he didn't know his neighbors, even though he is such a community-oriented kind of guy. Of course, he'd recently bought a house; probably he knows his parents' neighbors. Still, the point stands. A society in which no one is friendless because everyone lives next to someone and everyone is friends with his neighbors is not, at this time of day, a practicable proposal. It's far more utopian than my modest proposal to tax immigration rather than restricting it by force.

One reason that I wish JM and MS would be more serious and systematic in thinking about "community" is that I think it would eventually become clear to them that while their concerns might motivate serious and far-reaching changes in our customs and policies, it certainly would not provide any basis for defending immigration control such as the US practices today. I think that even when reason is abused to defend the indefensible the results are sometimes good, because argument has a tendency to lead to truth even when that is not the motive of the arguer. I experienced this personally in my own life, when as a teenager my efforts to defend an indefensible religion, Mormonism, awakening my conscience and intellect in a way that eventually led me out of the Mormon church and to orthodox Christianity. I think the American South is another example: the libertarian, romantic, aristocratic conservatism that originally emerged there in part as an attempt to rationalize the indefensible institution of slavery lingered afterwards and changed, and became, much later, an important component of the American political instinct that enabled the United States to avoid the encroachment of the social-democratic state which is now slowly smothering Western Europe. Similarly, there may be a genuine need to revive and rethink the idea of community and make our society more conducive to its development and health, but not to shut out the foreign-born by force.

Finally, MS's main argument seems to be simply that I'm in a small minority and that it's just too improbable that I'm right. She hopes that I will "moderate" my views. The truth is that I am the moderate here, looking for practical and just solutions, the extremist position being the view that every single human being in the six-million-square-mile territory of the United States must be here only with the permission of a government bureaucracy. Oddly enough, it's not even clear which of us-- myself, or JM and MS-- is more critical of the status quo, since I, after all, want those who are here to be able to stay here, and to that extent am an advocate of the status quo over against the presumptive advocacy for mass deportation of JM and MS... though on the other hand, I'm not really sure whether either of them stand on the issue. Whatever It Takes is the title of a book by J.D. Hayworth and a co-author, which I certainly will not read, but the title is a useful summary of the immorality inherent in nativism/"enforcing the law." What would Hayworth say, if I said that nothing short of regular pogroms will sufficiently offset the economic incentives to come here (especially since there is no moral reason for foreigners to obey this particular law if it is not in their interests to do so)? Presumably, "whatever it takes." What about JM and MS? I would be glad if they would draw the line somewhere, if they would say, "we'll try to enforce the borders, but we won't resort to x." So far I don't think they have ever done that. Hopefully they would draw the line at murder, at least. It's hard to see where else they would draw it, since we're already separating families by force. As for whether I'm in the minority, that's not clear. Most ordinary Americans just don't seem to have any idea of what our immigration policies is; they'll complain about illegal immigrants, then say they just want them to come in legally, following the rules, as if they're under the impression that most or all illegal immigrants had the option of coming legally and just chose, for some reason, not to take it. Wir haben es nichts gewusst, said the Germans after the Holocaust-- "we didn't know." I'm not saying migration restrictions are the moral equivalent of the Holocaust, of course, but there is a similar (wilful?) ignorance among Americans about what immigration enforcement involves. It's not clear in what sense a person who blames illegal immigrants for not using non-existent legal channels can be said to have an opinion about immigration policy at all. They have an opinion about immigration policy in an alternate universe. And it seems like most people, even some prominent pundits, are in exactly that situation. Moreover, if you were to poll the opinions of mankind about what US immigration policy should be, I might well find the vast majority supporting my position.

Still, MS's argument deserves serious examination. To what extent should one defer to the judgment of the majority? How likely is it that an individual is right and society is wrong? The multitude has more information, more experience than the individual, after all. And there is one area of life in which I think the value of deference to the general opinion of moralizing mankind in the teeth of one's own desires and reasoning can hardly be overstated: sexuality. Here the immediate mutual benefit seems so obvious and natural, the long shadow of negative consequences so impossible to explain, or rather, the explanations seem so threadbare and silly. Who can understand the mysterious interwovenness of body and soul, how deep the bonds and how potent their vengeance when violated? Who can foresee the way the pleasures of romance and of parenthood, so different and incommensurable, are yet bound together so that the latter must succeed the former for it to be complete? The wisdom of one's elders is invaluable here, for only those who have seen all the stages of a human life unfold can begin to appreciate how scarce a resource is youth's capacity for sexual love, and how prudently that resource must be spent. Nor is it easy for a young person to perceive and to credit the kind of stake that his or her family has in whom he or she marries, and why it ought to give them a say.

However, it is not tenable that deference to local majority opinion is always a better guide than an individual's judgment. After all, local majority opinion differs from time to time and place to place, and where there is disagreement at least one side must be wrong. For example, it is universally held today, at least among Americans and Western Europeans, that slavery is a horrible evil. But now think about this: for centuries, nay for millennia, slavery was practiced wherever mankind achieved a certain degree of wealth. I recently read Rodney Stark's account of how that ended, and in particular of the dominant role which religion played, from beginning to end, in the movement to abolish slavery. Slavery first disappeared from western Europe in the early Middle Ages. Later, when it was revived during the "Expansion of Europe" in the 16th and 17th centuries, it never penetrated Europe itself (at least not on a large scale), but instead was established in the New World and other overseas colonial possessions of Europe. The popes were unambiguously opposed to it from the beginning, even decreeing excommunications for those who enslaved others, but the Reformation and Counter-Reformation had greatly weakened them vis-a-vis secular rulers, and their opposition was mostly ineffectual, though-- Stark shows-- the Catholic Church did manage to ameliorate slavery by getting slave codes passed in Portuguese and Spanish colonies that were more lenient and humane than those in Protestant Barbados and North America. Yet in the end slavery lasted longer in the Catholic countries than in the Protestant countries, where abolition was pioneered by the Quakers, and later embraced by the Methodists and Protestant evangelists of the early 19th century like Charles Finney, and British abolitionists financed the antislavery movement in France.

Stark makes an important point which is relevant to the immigration question today. Slavery is by no means explicitly condemned by the Bible. Although the slave code of the ancient Jews, as described in the Mosaic law, is unusually lenient, the ancient Jews did practice slavery. The apostles, moreover, encouraged slaves to obey their masters, although in an epistle to Philemon, Paul seems to encourage him (but gently) to manumit a slave, Onesimus. So how could Christians come to the conclusion that slavery was sinful? Contra the biases of some historians, they certainly did not derive the concept from secular, liberal morality, for secular intellectuals mostly favored slavery: this idea began among Christians and became part of liberal morality later and as a side-effect. Rather, Christians derived this conclusion by reasoning from Biblical and theological premises:

[The 1754 Quaker anti-slavery pamphlet by John Woolman] was a model of gentle Quaker persuasion. He began by quoting Matt. 25:40: "For as much as ye did it to the least of my brethren, ye did it unto me," with the direct implication that to enslave a "Negro" was to enslave Christ. Although clearly aimed at slaveholding Quakers, it did not single them out but reminded all Quakers that "Negroes are our fellow creatures, and their present condition amongst us requires serious consideration," and that Friends are committed to justice, love, and the better of all humankind, not to self-interest. In his final paragraph he expressed his belief that while God has so far not intervened, he sees that "[Negroes] are trodden down and despised, yet he remembers them: he seeth their affliction," and soon God is apt to "humble the most haughty people" who prefer "gain to equity"...

[Later, under Woolman's influence, the Quaker Yearly Meeting] agreed to publish a tract of its own, constituting a far more direct attack on slavery: An Epistle of Caution and Advice, Concerning the Buying and Keeping of Slaves.

Written by a committee, this statement began by asking whether it was consistent with the Golden Rule to deprive "our fellow creatures of the valuable blessing liberty," or to "grow rich by their bondage"... Then... the committee got to the clincher. "Finally, brethren, we entreat you in... Gospel love, seriously to weigh the cause of detaining them in bondage. If it be for your own private gain, or any motive other than their good, it is much to be feared that the love of God, and the influence of the Holy Spirit is not the prevailing principle in you."...

Not to be outdone, many Christian groups and luminaries took up the cause of abolition, and soon abolitionist societies sprang up that were not associated with a specific denomination. But, through it all, the movement (as distinct from those it made sympathetic to the cause) was staffed by devout Christian activists, the majority of them clergy...

In 1833 leading abolitionists formed the American Anti-Slavery Society. Led by the fiery agitator and editor of The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879), the group adopted and published a ringing Declaration of Sentiments, filled with religious justifications. Noting that to hold a human being "in involuntary bondage" is, "according to Scripture" stealing, the docuemnt proclaimed it a certainty that "the slaves out instantly to be set free, and brought under the protection of law." Furthermore, all current laws "admitting the right of slavery, are therefore, before God, utterly null and void... an audacious usurpation of Divine prerogative" and "a presumptuous transgression of all the holy commandments."...

The American Roman Catholic Church faced not serious internal conflict over slavery because it had few Southern parishes, and, at least by the start of the nineteenth century, the clergy followed the pope in opposing slavery. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Pope Pius VII (1800 to 1823) demanded the suppression of the slave trade. Then, in 1839, Pope Gregory XVI (1831 to 1846) sent an Apostolic Letter to the Provincial Council of American Bishops in which he condemned slavery. It began with a fine example of theological "deduction." In his opening paragraph the pope admitted that the Apostles counseled slaves to obey their masters, but went on to note (as Woolman had also done) that just as Christ declared that whatever was done to the least of all humans, it was done to Him, "it naturally follows" that Christians should treat slaves as their brothers. He then pointed out that "In the process of time, the fog of pagan superstition being more completely dissipated and the manners of barbarous people have been softened, thanks to Faith operating by Charity... there are no more slaves in the greater number of Christian nations." Unfortunately, there were "among the Faithful" men who were "shamefully blinded by their desire for sordid gain," and who went to distant countries and there "did not hesitate to reduce to slavery Indians, Negroes, and other wretched people." Then, desiring to remove such a shame from all Christian nations" and "walking in the footsteps of Our Predecessors," the pope demanded an end to slavery...

The larger point is that abolitionists, whether popes or evangelists, spoke almost exclusively in the language of the Christian faith. And although many Southern clergy proposed theological defenses of slavery, pro-slavery rhetoric was overwhelmingly secular-- references were made to "liberty" and "states' rights," not to "sin" or "salvation." This was conclusively demonstrated by Auping, who performed a content analysis of writings by randomly selected samples of prominent abolitionists and defenders of slavery. The abolitionists were far more likely to invoke God, and the difference persisted even when only clergy were compared...

But there is another and far more persuasive tack taken to minimize the importance of religion in abolishing slavery. It is argued that many sincere Christians were quite able to square slavery with theology-- as Francis Asbury, first Methodist bishop of the United States, put it in 1798, "Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians... in the highest flights of rapturous piety, still maintain and defend [slavery]." This being the case, the argument goes, it must have been not religion per se but something else that prompted some Christians to conclude that it was a sin to hold humans in bondage. But, as Asbury was fully aware, that conclusion misses the point. The case against slavery is theological, not revelational. Had Moses been given a commandment against slavery, then only heretical Jews and Christians could have owned slaves. Or had Jesus proclaimed that no slave master shall enter heaven, there would have been no ambiguity as to what Christians must do. But theology is based on human interpretations, and therefore sincere and brilliant seekers may reach opposite conclusions. Asbury did not propose that those who accepted slavery were ignorant of revelations, but that they had drawn incorrect theological conclusions, that they had neither "a sufficient sense of religion nor of liberty."

Abolition was not inherent in Christian scripture; it was only a possible conclusion... I do not propose that monotheism or even Christian culture was a sufficient basis for deeming slavery to be a sin. Instead, I propose that it was a necessary basis, in that only those religious thinkers working within the Christian tradition were able to reach anti-slavery conclusions (with the exception of two Jewish sects). (Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God, pp. 340-345)

The immigration issue today seems to be in a similar place.  It is not that the Bible unambiguously condemns immigration restrictions or declares for freedom of migration, although particular episodes, like the Exodus from Egypt, are suggestive.  But reasoning from Biblical premises cannot but strongly point towards open borders, particularly when the existence of illegal immigrants and their families on US soil transforms the issue into one of what kind and degree of violence will be resorted to in order to enforce a law which can be given no basis in justice.  The Golden Rule is certainly sufficient to condemn migration restrictions, for who of us can seriously say that if he had illegally entered the United States in order to feed his family, or earn enough to provide medical care for a child, he would wish to be deported?  And yet Matt. 25:40 makes the Golden Rule far more powerful, for while the Golden Rule seems abstract, Matt. 25:40 compels us to imagine that what we do to our fellow man we do to Christ. The fact that, as Pope Benedict observes, Jesus and the Holy Family were refugees, drives the point home. Current US law would deport the Holy Family to be executed by the agents of Herod. "Inasmuch as ye have done it to the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me."

The Bad Guys

Mort Kondracke: "'Nativist Lobby' is Winning on Immigration" (Roll Call)

The failure of Congress and two presidents to enact immigration reform is plunging the nation into an ugly future. Call it the Arizonification of America.

Quite apart from the ghastly shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D) and 19 others in Tucson, Ariz., the state truly has become, as Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik described it, “a mecca for racism and bigotry” — largely over immigration.

It has become a state of Minuteman vigilantism, death threats against politicians and judges, talk-radio demagoguery, and bullying of Latinos and rival politicians by “America’s toughest sheriff,” Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County.

Now, governors and legislators in 23 other states are considering following Arizona’s lead in directing local police to act as immigration officers. And politicians in several states are contriving to, in effect, amend the U.S. Constitution to deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. if their parents are illegal immigrants.

All this represents a high-water mark in the influence of the “nativist lobby” — a richly funded assemblage of national and local groups organized by Michigan ophthalmologist John Tanton.

The groups, which have gained respectability, include the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the Center for Immigration Studies and NumbersUSA. But some investigations have tied Tanton to white-supremacist ideology as well.

The move to end birthright citizenship is led by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who is affiliated with FAIR’s legal arm.

Tanton’s groups are making use of economic hard times to argue that immigrants — legal and illegal — are stealing jobs from Americans and straining government budgets. It’s largely bogus because immigrants tend to take jobs that Americans won’t or can’t do and because illegal workers pay taxes but can’t get benefits.When federal Judge Susan Bolton halted enforcement of major parts of the law, she received hate mail and death threats...

And so did Judge John Roll, when he ruled in 2009 that illegal immigrants could sue a local rancher on charges of harassment. Roll died in the Tucson shooting rampage at the hands of deranged gunman Jared Loughner.

Loughner had nothing to do with the immigration issue, but there has been plenty of other ugliness in Arizona over it. Does America really want that to metastasize nationwide?

"Jeb Bush and Latino Outreach" (RealClearPolitics):

Bush told the gathering that, because of the growth of the Latino population nationwide, it would be "incredibly stupid" for the Republican Party to ignore these votes.

Frankly, Governor, "ignoring" would be a step up in GOP-Hispanic relations. More often than not, what happens now is that Republican candidates at the local, state and national level use Hispanics as a convenient foil to scare up votes from whites who are terrified of the coming demographic realignment and unsure of where they fit in the new scheme.

The terrified include right-wing radio host Mark Levin, who pounced on Bush for "race-baiting" and called his remarks "divisive" and "destructive of conservatism." Levin also accused Bush of not being "that bright" and lacking a basic "understanding of the greatness of this nation."

Levin has it backward. Repairing the breach between Republicans and Hispanics won't destroy conservatism; it will help save it. And much of the greatness of this nation is wrapped up, first and foremost, in its immigrant tradition, which some conservatives seem to want to unravel by limiting legal immigration.

No one summed up the GOP's predicament better than Lincoln Diaz-Balart, the former Republican congressman from Florida. Since the United States is a nation of immigrants, he said, the American people would probably never again allow Republicans to become the country's majority party if they see them as being anti-immigrant.

I'll add: With Hispanics on track to make up 30 percent of the U.S. population by 2050 and likely to decide elections not just in Texas, California and Florida but all over the country, the perception that the GOP is hostile to Latinos is also hazardous to the health of the party.

Yet, even at a gathering like this, where many agree that the Republican Party has a problem with Hispanics, there were those who clung to the idea that the issue is simply one of tone -- easily fixed by a few turns of the public relations screwdriver.

Wrong. As I said during my panel, the GOP doesn't just have a problem with tone. It's not that simple. When it comes to immigration, the Republican message is toxic. There is too much dishonesty, too much racism, and too many simplistic solutions to what is a complicated problem.

If the GOP wants to make a serious play for Hispanic voters in 2012 and beyond, this has to change. The party is struggling with demons. It doesn't need a publicist. It needs an exorcist.

Second-Class 'Citizen of the Year' (RFE/RL)

She's young, bright, well educated, and she loves her adoptive country, Norway.

She recently published a successful book and was even named "2010 Citizen of the Year" by a Norwegian magazine.

Yet the Russian-born Maria Amelie remains an illegal migrant after almost a decade in Norway and faces imminent deportation.

Her story, which she recounted in her book "Illegal Norwegian" published in September, has moved many in Norway.

Rights groups, politicians, and celebrities have thrown their weight behind the 25-year-old Amelie. Some 1,000 supporters rallied for her release in Oslo this week, and some 90,000 people have joined her support group on Facebook.

Amelie, who was released on January 18 after being briefly placed in a detention center for migrants near Oslo, insists her home is in Norway, not Russia.

"I live in constant fear," she told NRK, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, shortly after her release. "As soon as I pause for a few minutes, it becomes difficult to breathe, which is the way I felt at the detention center. I've come a long way, I've fought for myself. My friends and the whole country supported me in this fight. Where am I supposed to go now? My home is here, in Norway."

Norwegian authorities, however, have refused to bow to pressure. Amelie was detained by eight police officers on January 12 and placed in a detention center for migrants near Oslo where she said she was treated like "a criminal."...

"She managed to learn fluent Norwegian within a year and a half, she graduated from high school with only top grades two years after arriving in Norway," Lindeman says. "She managed to enter university, where she gained a master's degree with top grades."

Morally, the right and wrong of this issue is as clear as the racial segregation issue in the 1960s.

Brothers Judd posted this one:

"Natural Law from a Birmingham Jail" (Catholic Educational Resource Center)

On April 12,1963 – Good Friday – Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led a group of about 50 anti-segregation protesters into downtown Birmingham, Alabama. It was a peaceful protest, but they were not naïve: They knew that their message would offend and cause problems. King was not surprised when they were all arrested.

Eight white clergymen from Birmingham, including a Catholic bishop and a rabbi, wrote a letter appealing to the black population to stop such demonstrations. These clergymen were not bigots; they just did not want the kind of confrontations that King had provoked. They wanted to let the courts work toward integration. Their letter was published in the local newspaper under the title, "A Call for Unity."

King's response to the clergymen, his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," was one of the finest modern appeals to natural law. In it, he wrote: "I would agree with St. Augustine that, an unjust law is no law at all." Moreover, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."As such, "One has . . . a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."

King's analysis, of course, raises the question of how to determine whether a law is just. Here, King turned to natural law. He explained: "A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law." He then looked to St. Thomas Aquinas: "An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law." Applying that to the case at hand, King explained: "All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority."

Directly responding to the clergymen, King wrote: "In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion?" After providing some examples, he explained his problem with the suggestion that they should wait for the courts to act: "It is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber."

King explained that "oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained."

King said that a change had come in his way of thinking: "I have tried [in the past] to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends." Thus, the legal system, while "moral" in and of itself, was at that time in history protecting the immoral system of segregation.

What seems odd is that it is now obligatory to admire Martin Luther King, yet most people do not admire contemporary civil disobedience. But this is not really new. It seems like people have always admired those who defied authority in the past, yet disdain those who defy authority in the present. It seems to me that Jesus meant something like this when He said: "You build the tombs of the prophets, and your fathers killed them. In fact, you bear witness that you approve the deeds of your fathers; for they indeed killed them, and you build their tombs" (Luke 11:47)-- although I'm not sure I quite understand this saying. Anyway, Martin Luther King's position is a valuable reminder to those who (profess to) disbelieve in natural law.

Slavery, MacIntyre, and Natural Rights

This week's Economist provides an extended survey of the prevalence of rape in wartime:

SHORTLY after the birth of her sixth child, Mathilde went with her baby into the fields to collect the harvest. She saw two men approaching, wearing what she says was the uniform of the FDLR, a Rwandan militia. Fleeing them she ran into another man, who beat her head with a metal bar. She fell to the ground with her baby and lay still. Perhaps thinking he had murdered her, the man went away. The other two came and raped her, then they left her for dead.

Mathilde’s story is all too common. Rape in war is as old as war itself. After the sack of Rome 16 centuries ago Saint Augustine called rape in wartime an “ancient and customary evil”. For soldiers, it has long been considered one of the spoils of war. Antony Beevor, a historian who has written about rape during the Soviet conquest of Germany in 1945, says that rape has occurred in war since ancient times, often perpetrated by indisciplined soldiers. But he argues that there are also examples in history of rape being used strategically, to humiliate and to terrorise, such as the Moroccan regulares in Spain’s civil war...

Congo’s horrors are mind-boggling. A recent study by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and Oxfam examined rape survivors at the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, a town in North Kivu province. Their ages ranged from three to 80. Some were single, some married, some widows. They came from all ethnicities. They were raped in homes, fields and forests. They were raped in front of husbands and children. Almost 60% were gang-raped. Sons were forced to rape mothers, and killed if they refused...

In the Sudanese region of Darfur, rape and other forms of sexual violence have also been a brutally effective way to terrorise and control civilians. Women are raped in and around the refugee camps that litter the region, mostly when they leave the camps to collect firewood, water and food. Those of the same ethnicity as the two main rebel groups have been targeted most as part of the campaign of ethnic cleansing. According to Human Rights Watch, rape is chronically underreported, partially because in the mostly Muslim region sexual violence is a sensitive subject. Between October 2004 and February 2005 Médecins Sans Frontières, a French charity, treated almost 500 women and girls in South Darfur. The actual number of victims is likely to be much higher...

But in Congo the court system is in pieces. There have been fewer than 20 prosecutions of rape as either a war crime or a crime against humanity. The American Bar Association, which helps victims bring their cases to court in eastern Congo, has processed around 145 cases in the past two years. This has resulted in about 45 trials and 36 convictions based on domestic legislation, including a law introduced in 2006 to try and address the problem of sexual violence. Those who work with the survivors of rape in Congo have mixed feelings about the 2006 law. It has pricked consciences and made people more aware of their rights, concedes [Hillary] Margolis, [who runs the International Rescue Committee's sexual-violence programme in North Kivu]. It creates a theoretical accountability that could help punish perpetrators. But for women seeking justice, it has yet to have much impact. “There is still a glimmer of hope in people’s eyes when they talk about the law. But the judicial and security systems need to be improved so that it can be applied better, or people may lose confidence in it,” Ms Margolis says.

Now, I want to make a pedestrian point, namely, that the good guys here are animated by a concern to protect human rights. This doesn't come as a surprise to anyone. It's the perennial dog-bites-man story of humanitarianism: atrocities are happening somewhere, human rights groups are trying to help the victims and to awaken the world's conscience to do more.

And this raises the question: what do people who don't believe in rights, like Alasdair MacIntyre, or maybe Professor Steven Smith, whose article I deal with in my last post (although it's not clear from his article whether he believes in rights or not, for a reader might suspect that he does believe in them but wants to persuade his interlocutor to accept a providentialist worldview in order to provide a basis for his belief in rights) think that human rights groups are doing? Do they approve of them? I presume so, but why, if they think these groups' basic moral concept is misguided? Would they try to offer an alternative account of how "human rights" groups should think about, and justify, their work, and if so, what would it be?

It is not so easy. Though MacIntyre-- I'll focus on him since his ethical position is more clearly stated, and Professor Smith seems to be influenced by him-- would not embrace a utilitarian view, since this is an obvious alternative, we should consider it. And to put it bluntly, it is not even clear, from a utilitarian perspective, that rape is wrong. As a matter of biology, it pleasures both perpetrator and victim. Presumably for the victim the pain exceeds the pleasure, but for the perpetrator we may make the opposite presumption, and so the effect on the "greatest happiness of the greatest number" is ambiguous. Even if, for a particular transaction of this kind, we judge the balance to be negative, one must take into account the broader effects. If the act brings children into the world, what is the balance of the pleasure and pain the children will experience? Also, since a license for rape may serve as a means of compensating soldiers, what are the broader military effects of this? If we think rape is, on balance, harmful in itself, might it be justified if it enables the more beneficent side in a civil war to recruit enough soldiers to procure victory?

If the last paragraph sounds like a peculiarly wicked and digusting abuse of the faculty of reason, it is. But that's the point. Respect for human rights is an indispensable element of moral reasoning, and to discard it makes one liable to stumble into monstrous conclusions.

However, we are arguing not with the utilitarians but with MacIntyre. What would he offer to human rights groups as a substitute for their moral errors, in order to justify continuing their good work? Or can we suspect MacIntyre, if not of personally condoning these atrocities, of holding a meta-ethical position which would tempt, or even compel, him to condone them, or at least make him incapable of providing grounds for objecting to them?

Alas, as painful and shocking as this last suggestion is, I fear there are more reasons that we cannot dismiss it.  And let me preface this by saying that MacIntyre's After Virtue is one of my favorite books on ethics, one which I both admire and to which I am much indebted.  Yet I think it must be acknowledged nonetheless that there are reasons to have grave doubts about MacIntyre.  As evidence, let me first cite the very end of After Virtue:

If my account of our moral condition is correct... what matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are not waiting for a Godot, but for another-- doubtless very different-- St. Benedict.

Now, I am the last person to discourage calls to monasticism.  In the last chapter of Principles of a Free Society, I go so far in extolling the heroic historical role of monasticism that a reader might wonder for a moment whether there is any credit left over to give to anyone else for the achievements of civilization. And in a sense it is always correct to view ourselves as seeking refuge in the midst of a world that is falling apart, for we are all doomed to die, and only by turning away from ourselves and seeking refuge in God can we hope to pass safely through the dark age that awaits us when the soul is separated from the body.

Considered as a historical analogy, however, MacIntyre's conclusion is absurdly inapt. I tend to think, with Rodney Stark, that the fall of a Roman Empire was much less of a disaster than it has generally been held to be, indeed for some, perhaps for many, it may have been a liberation and a blessing. But it was a setback for civilization in many ways, e.g., literacy and education. There was a lot of violence; I think there were major declines in population. Some arts and luxuries declined or were lost.

Our own times are just the opposite. When MacIntyre published After Virtue in 1981, the post-World War II boom had raised living standards sharply in the West, virtually ending hunger, and bringing TVs and refrigerators and washing machines and air conditioning and all sorts of other new technologies, not only to the elite, but to the broad majority of the population. Not only was literacy not in retreat, but college education was becoming commonplace for an unprecedentedly large share of the population. But perhaps MacIntyre's words are meant as a prediction for the future? If so, they are if anything even less apt. In 1981, while such intense gloom about Western civilization was indefensible, much of the rest of the world was subject to tyranny and totalitarianism, and the 1970s in particular had been a decade of atrocities in Idi Amin's Uganda, Cambodia, China and so on. Since then, a freedom and prosperity much like that attained by the West have come within reach of more and more people's including the countries of central and eastern Europe formerly under communism and the Pacific Rim of Asia; and in the last decade Latin America and India have also been booming. The end of hunger and illiteracy worldwide no longer seems like a utopian dream, but will be achieved within the next few decades if current trends continue. Dark ages indeed!

I believe that MacIntyre was, at the time of writing, a former Marxist.  In the context of academia, one is doubly disinclined to condemn him for that, since (a) Marxism is common enough in academia (except economics) that one has to learn to regard it tolerantly, and (b) the fact that he left Marxism makes anti-Marxists want to congratulate and welcome him, and encourage him to refute his old comrades.  Still, at this point I don't think any doubt can really be admitted, in light of communist history, that ever to have been a Marxist was a huge error of judgment on anyone's part, and it is a reason to regard MacIntyre warily.  Just because your friend seems sincerely penitent about the drunken car crash he got in last week, doesn't mean you shouldn't be especially careful to ask him how much he's had to drink before he drives home.  As a Marxist, MacIntyre once thought capitalism is so bad that that it ought to be overthrown by revolution.  That's insane.  Are there any signs in After Virtue that a similar intellectual malady lingers on in his thinking?  And here I would draw attention to what MacIntyre has to say about Edmund Burke:

We are apt to be misled [in thinking about tradition] by the ideological uses to which the concept of a tradition has been put by conservative political theorists. Characeristically such theorists have followed Burke in contrasting tradition with reason and the stability of tradition with conflict. Both contrasts obfuscate. For all reasoning takes place within the context of some traditional mode of thought, transcending through criticism and invention the limitations of what had hitherto been reasoned in that tradition; this is as true of modern physics as of medieval logic. Moreover when a tradition is in good order it is always partially constituted by an argument about the goods the pursuit of which gives to that tradition its particular point and purpose.

So when an institution-- a university, say, or a farm, or a hospital-- is the bearer of a tradition of practice or practices, its common life will be partly, but in a centrally important way, constituted by a continuous argument as to what a university is and ought to be or what good farming is or what good medicine is. Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead.

The individualism of modernity could of course find no use for the notion of tradition within its own conceptual scheme except as an adversary notion; it therefore all too willingly abandoned it to the Burkeans, who, faithful to Burke's own allegiance, tried to combine adherence in politics to a conception of tradition which would vindicate the oligarchical revolution of property of 1688 and adherence in economics to the institutions of the free market. The theoretical incoherence of this mismatch did not deprive it of ideological usefulness. But the outcome has been that modern conservatives are for the most part engaged in conserving only older rather than later versions of liberal individualism. Their own core doctrine is as liberal and as individualist as that of self-avowed liberals.

For an American conservative who reads MacIntyre as a presumptive intellectual ally, this passage is discombobulating.  Conservatives usually lionize Burke.  Even liberals tend to like him, since his insight that the French Revolution must lead to military dictatorship displays a wisdom that anyone who wants to defend liberty and prevent tyranny must envy and emulate.  One would expect MacIntyre, as a critic of the Enlightenment and an advocate of tradition, to appeal to the wisdom of Burke and regard as an ally or even a hero.  Bizarrely, his attitude is one of almost contemptuous dismissal. 

Again, MacIntyre's verdict on "the oligarchical revolution of property of 1688... and the institutions of the free market" seems almost wholly negative.  How can this be?  The Anglo-American democracies, whose origins lie in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, have carried the standard of liberty triumphantly in good times and bad for three centuries, making a successful stand against the proto-totalitarian Napoleon and the monstrous tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin.  The liberal constitution of England had its flaws, no doubt, but surely it must be recognized as a force for good.  But MacIntyre's words suggest the opposite.

And the claim that "when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead," is even more bizarre.  Not only was the tradition of English liberty (and property) not dead when Burke defended it in the late 18th century, but it has since gone from strength to strength, thriving, spreading its influence over the globe, vanquishing one rival ideology after another.  Even in the culturally alien environment of India, British traditions took root to the extent that India still lives by British institutions of the common law and representative government to this day.  MacIntyre's historical analysis here is as bizarrely inapt as his prediction, or diagnosis, of "the new dark ages that are already upon us."  How is one to account for these huge errors of judgment in a man so obviously intelligent?

I think one reason for it is MacIntyre's former Marxism.  MacIntyre let his mind be poisoned by propaganda against the capitalist order, and he retained indefensible prejudices against it even after he outgrew belief in the Marxist system, which blinded him to the merits of Burke, and which made him look regard the triumph of liberal capitalism as a "new dark ages," in the face of overwhelming evidence of 20th-century capitalism's beneficent impact on the human condition.  In short, MacIntyre was a sore loser.  Now, God knows how to work good even out of man's folly, and in this case there is an element of higher insight even in MacIntyre's bitter grumbling, for compared to the City of God, even these most beneficent of all human polities in history which we Westerners of the late 20th and early 21st centuries are privileged to inhabit, are as unjust and miserable as MacIntyre's Marxist prejudices caused him to regard them.  MacIntyre's fans, like myself, are free to read him from that perspective and continue to admire him.  But that shouldn't cause us to be any less contemptuous of some of his historical judgments, as such.

Another reason, I think, for MacIntyre's low opinion of democratic capitalism, is that he's a snob.  If you fancy yourself a member of an intellectual elite, you might well be inclined to take a dim view of the age of mass college education.  It is notable that the various moralities that MacIntyre attacks and dismisses, particularly those of Kant and the utilitarians, are egalitarian, and those among which he leaves standing and between which at one point he offers readers a choice as the only viable alternatives-- "Nietzsche or Aristotle?" is the title of Chapter 9-- are both highly aristocratic or elitist.  And we may here make a connection to the theme with which we began, rape, or to make it more general, slavery, the coercive use of others for one's pleasure.  For purposes of this post, I wish I knew the writings of Aristotle and Nietzsche much better, but I'll do my best, and others may correct me.   

It seems clear that Nietzsche would be an enthusiastic fan of military rape.  I don't know whether he ever said so explicitly, but his vague glorification of heroes, his contempt for ordinary morality, his extreme sexism, his desire to find in evolution a source of a new ethics (and if the source of morality lies in the evolutionary imperatives of one's selfish genes then no action is more meritorious than rape) all point inexorably to this conclusion.  Not surprisingly, the Bolsheviks and Nazis, who answered Nietzsche's call to throw out the old moral order and create a new higher man, practiced military rape on a large scale. 

To digress a bit, I regard it as a scandal and a serious stain on the character of the philosophical profession that Nietzsche is regarded with respect as an important philosopher.  Philosophers often come to pretty crazy conclusions, and it seems likely that a historical survey of these "lovers of wisdom" would reveal that in their conclusions they exhibit a good deal less wisdom than ordinary people who, making less effort to reason clearly, just accept most of what common sense tells them.  But philosophers are legitimated by the presumption that they adhere to high epistemic standards, that they reason and argue in a careful and systematic way, and that even when they come to crazy conclusions, they have good reasons for them, and state them, and that they are ready to abandon their positions if refuted in argument, and thus serve as a stimulus to common sense to better articulate and defend itself.  But Nietzsche does not adhere to high epistemic standards, does not reason and argue in a careful and systematic way, does not give reasons for his views and expose himself to refutation.  His writing consists mostly of a few wild claims, a vague vision which however is never made very clear or argued for, and reams of sneering, albeit with an erudite, subtle, and poetic flavor, against moral philosophers he despises, namely almost everyone. 

So why is Nietzsche regarded, by philosophers and therefore by the public which accepts the canon approved by the specialists, as an important and venerable philosopher?  Let me ask a perhaps parallel question.  Suppose that the top twenty most-read authors among mathematicians included, amidst logicians and geometers and graph theorists, one pornographer.  I don't think we would conclude that this pornographer is a great mathematician.  It would just lower our opinion of the moral character of mathematicians.  Now suppose that a pornographer appear among the top twenty most-read authors for great literary critics.  In this case, we might suspect that this particular pornographer possessed, for his trade, unusual literary merit, which enabled him to appeal to literary critics.  However, we would probably not be inclined to rank him with Shakespeare and Tolstoy, because we would suspect that the critics' main motive was still the stimulation of lust and not literary enjoyment properly speaking. 

I think the reason for Nietzsche's popularity among philosophers is similar, namely, his writing is to snobbery as pornography is to lust.  He is extremely artful in stimulating pride and vainglory in his readers.  Philosophers like him, partly because he is erudite and subtle and poetic, but that by itself gives no one the right to regard him as a philosopher, and partly because they are prone to snobbish vainglory and elitism, and Nietzsche gratifies this vice.  The public should not tolerate it.  When a philosopher mentions Nietzsche, we should say, "Excuse me, you're paid to argue, to reason, to exchange arguments with other philosophers, that is, other devotees of reasoning and argument. If you read that trash in your spare time, that's your problem, but we need to maintain standards here. Find another way to make your point." 

But anyway.  Aristotle.  I know that he endorsed slavery, regarding some people as natural slaves.  To endorse slavery is prima facie to endorse rape, since if a master is to make decisions for his chattels and command them by force if necessary, it would seem to follow that he can make decisions about whom they'll sleep with.  There might be ways to avoid this conclusion by arguing that the rights of masters did not extend to sexual matters, and perhaps Aristotle said so, I don't know.  But slavery, including slave-concubinage, was widely practiced in ancient Greece and Rome.  I'm pretty sure Aristotle endorsed the enslavement of captives in war.  So as far as my limited knowledge goes, and I hope others will correct me if I am wrong, Aristotle would effectively have endorsed, or at least would not have condemned, practices much like those against which Human Rights Watch and Hillary Margolis of the International Rescue Committee are struggling in Congo.  And Aristotle's most famous student, Alexander the Great, seems to have committed, and incited his army to, rapes of Persian women on a large scale.

So where does this leave MacIntyre?  It's less and less clear what resources he could draw upon if he wants to support Human Rights Watch et al.  He is dismissive of the liberal capitalist order in the context of which military rape, a scourge through much of history, has ceased to be a practical danger for so many women in today's world.  The moral philosophers he lionizes, Nietzsche and especially Aristotle, could not help him and seem to be on the other side.  The fact that he is still under lingering Marxist influences puts him in some very bad company, e.g., Mussolini, Pol Pot.  But the main charge is what it was from the first: that he rejects the principle, human rights, which animates campaigns against military rape today and, before that, against slavery. 

Why does MacIntyre reject natural/human rights?  At one point in After Virtue (pp. 67ff.), MacIntyre writes:

It is first of all clear that the claim that I have a right to do or have something is a quite different type of claim from the claim that I need or want or will be benefited by something. From the first-- if it is the only relevant consideration -- it follows that others ought not to interfere with my attempts to do or have whatever it is, whether it is for my own good or not. From the second it does not.

Well said, except that MacIntyre seems to state this as if it something odd, when he has only articulated a most mundane truth which is operative in practice every day.  I am at a party, and my friend starts smoking.  I do not think that she needs to, or that it will benefit her.  On the contrary, I think it is bad for her.  She does want to do it.  But the reason why "I ought not to interfere" is that she has a right to do it.  Hence I would not rip the cigarette out of her mouth.  Neither would MacIntyre, I presume.  By contrast, if she got drunk and angry and began trying to break the host's plates, she once again (a) does not need to, (b) will not benefit from it, but (c) wants to.  In those respects, her breaking plates is the same as her smoking.  But as she does not have a right to break plates as she does to smoke, it is perfectly appropriate for me to interfere and try to stop her, even by restraining force.  MacIntyre would no doubt accept this, but he argues:

Claims to the possession of rights presuppose... the existence of a socially established set of rules.  Such sets of rules only come into existence at particular historical periods under particular social circumstances.  They are in no way universal features of the human condition...  Those forms of human behavior which presuppose notions of some ground to entitlement, such as the notion of a right, always have a highly specific and socially local character, and... the existence of particular types of social institution or practice is a necessary condition for the notion of a claim to the possession of a right being an intelligible type of human performance.  (As a matter of historical fact, such types of social institution or practice have not existed universally in human societies.)

At best, MacIntyre's argument depends on an appeal to a historical claim.  It is far from clear that his claim is true.  As far as I can tell from my certainly far from comprehensive (and no doubt inferior to MacIntyre's) knowledge of the history of morals, the idea of violence, which I say in Principles of a Free Society "may be defined as any violation of the habeas corpus principle" (or natural right of self-ownership), seems to be universal.  Even if MacIntyre's historical claim is right, his argument is not necessarily compelling, as MacIntyre seems is aware:

It would of course be a little odd that there should be such rights attaching to human beings simply qua human beings in light of the fact... that there is no expression in any ancient or medieval language correctly translated by our expression 'a right' until near the close of the middle ages: the concept lacks any means of expression in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or Arabic, classical or medieval, before about 1400, let alone in Old English, or in Japanese even as late as the mid-nineteenth century. From this it does not of course follow that there are no natural or human rights; it only follows that no one could have known that there were. And this at least raises certain questions. But we do not need to be distracted into answering them, for the truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns. (After Virtue, p. 69)

MacIntyre's argument is incomplete by his own confession, even if his historical claims are conceded.  "From this it does not of course follow... but the truth is plain..." seems to be an appeal to intuition.  And that intuition is heavily conditioned by the apparently impressive claim he has just made that no one could have known that there were rights before 1400 because there wasn't a word for them, or more precisely, "there was no expression... correctly translated by our expression 'a right'."  But is MacIntyre's semantic finickiness appropriate here?  If there was no word with exactly the same meaning, doubtless there were words and phrases with similar meanings.  In any case, while doing research for Principles of a Free Society I read (much of) The Idea of Natural Rights, by a philosophical medievalist, Brian Tierney, and I was struck by the brusqueness with which Tierney dismisses MacIntyre:

MacIntyre has deplored the "deep lack of historical consciousness" that infects much of modern moral philosophy, but he does not udnerstand the history of the rights theories that he criticizes. (Tierney, Kindle Edition, Locations 60-66)

Moreover, MacIntyre's critique of rights is part of his general demolition of the Enlightenment project to provide a rational basis for morality, but this demolition job obviously must be followed by an attempt at reconstruction of some kind of morality, and when MacIntyre gets around to that, he creates an opening to reintroduce the theory of rights.  MacIntyre argues that the virtues can be understood in the context of a 'practice,' by which he means "any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized," e.g. architecture, music, chess, war.  This leads MacIntyre to:

a partial and tentative definition of a virtue: A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods. (After Virtue, p. 191) 

One of the virtues is "justice, [which] requires that we treat others in respect of merit or desert according to uniform and impersonal standards" (p. 192), or as he says elsewhere, "giving what is due."  To become a philosopher, for example, one must initially "give what is due" to the established canon of philosophers, reading and respecting and emulating them.  I can't do justice to MacIntyre's argument here.  Suffice it to say that I think he does what he sets out to do, finding a basis for ethics that lies outside, and is not vulnerable to the critiques of, the spurious pleasure-pain calculus of the utilitarians and the dangerously contentless categorical imperative of Kant, and from which, as it were, a desiccated moral landscape can be re-irrigated. 

What MacIntyre does not do, and what greatly needs doing, is to codify the virtues into at least some prescriptive rules that ordinary people can live by.  In this respect, MacIntyre remains essentially pagan.  By situating the virtues in the realm of practices he seems to have designed an ethics for great chessplayers or musicians or warriors, perhaps for a Nietzschean artistic elite, which cannot obviously be transferred to, so to speak, "the bungled and the botched" who will never be masters of any craft, but who, one hopes, may still lead moral lives.  Christianity, which exalts the humble, plays very little role in After Virtue.  If one criticism of Aristotle's ethics is that is only for the wealthy (the "magnanimous man" clearly needs to have a lot of money), Alasdair MacIntyre's might be criticized as being only for college professors.  The problem which he sets out to address in Chapter 1 is not a practical one like feeding the hungry, or educating the illiterate, or military rape, but a quintessentially professorly problem, that moral discourse is "shrill" and "interminable."  In his conclusion, he wants to preserve "the intellectual and moral life," as if the two were of equal importance or even synonyms.  But this kind of pagan virtue was quite consistent, historically, with exploiting slaves and enjoying concubines, and I think we can see why, for if justice consists in "giving what is due" to those who excel in the context of practices like music or architecture, it seems quite plausible that nothing, and in particular not the retention of her virginity, is due to a simple, unaccomplished girl taken in war.

Can we say that, if "giving what is due" in the context of a practice consists of recognizing the excellence of the authorities in one's field, there is also something that is due to every human being qua human being, namely that we respect their rights?  Why can't we use MacIntyre's case for the virtue of justice to overturn MacIntyre's earlier dismissal of the idea of natural rights?  If we can say this, it might not be a problem for our ethical theory that some societies have been much more successful than others in articulating and institutionalizing concepts of rights, any more than it's a problem for musical theory that not all civilizations have discovered the circle of fifths.  And we should not be surprised that Human Rights Watch and International Rescue Committee can go to Congo and tell people about their rights and find their ideals quickly embraced by the local population (even if implementation is difficult) any more than we should be surprised to find that Chinese people can admire Beethoven.

Principles of a Free Society begins by suggesting a somewhat Aristotelian approach to grounding the idea of natural rights:

A human being is mind and body. The body has a particular telos, or peculiar flourishing, of which he have some natural understanding. Thus, we see the difference between a healthy body and a body wounded, injured, decrepit, or sick... To flourish, the body must have food, water, and air; must not be subjected to cold or heat too extreme or for too long; must not be pierced by sharp objects or crushed by heavy blows; must not be exposed to certain substances, certain types of radiation, certain intensities of sound; must be allowed a certain degree fo movement and a certain amount of sleep; should not spend too much time in water or darkness; and so forth. Each body is naturally subject to one human mind. To be subject to that mind is part of the body's telos. The means by which the body can be subjected to the power of other human minds-- it can be beaten, wounded, dragged in chains, and so on-- trespass against or violate the body's telos. (Principles of a Free Society, p. 1)

I think this expresses an ideal that the benevolent and humanitarian heroes of history have always held and sought to realize in the world, while the perpetrators and tyrants of history are those who ride roughshod over it.  Its name is human, or natural, rights.

Natural Law

My book, Principles of a Free Society, was meant to provoke controversies, in the course of which I would hope to win acceptance of a position which the book does not claim to provide a complete defense. In the introduction, I write:

My goal here is to communicate a position, not rigorously to prove it from indubitable foundations. I will have succeeded if readers understand that position, even they are unwilling... to accept it. (p. viii)

Indeed, even the blurbs I got for the book, though very positive, all contain reservations about accepting the argument in toto. Bryan Caplan writes:

Nathan Smith is one of the most creative and thought young social scientists on the market. If he doesn't convince you, he will at least intrigue you.

I glowed with pleasure at that, and am grateful for the praise, but the "if he doesn't convince you" certainly suggests that Caplan himself is not fully convinced by the argument. Similarly, Nick Schulz writes:

You hold in your hands an extraordinary book. In this study of the principles of a free society, Nathan Smith develops a novel and convincing argument in favor of the free and open migration of people. Smith's patriotic case for welcoming those from beyond our borders is smart, powerful and compelling. While there remains room for disagreement, after encountering his arguments you will think with greater wisdom and clarify about matters of enduring significance, especially about the nature of human freedom.

Again, high praise, but a reservation: "while there remains room for disagreement." Finally, Charles Rowley writes:

As Nathanael Smith admits at the outset, this is a dangerous little book, a treatise that, if it were to be published now in any number of countries, might put his liberty, even his life, at risk. It is not a volume for which any autocrat-- or indeed most powerful democratic politicians-- will find a prominent place in their personal libraries. Yet, it is a book that should be read by anyone who loves liberty and desires to think afresh about the meaning and implications of that all-important concept.

The author does not spare our sensibilities in this thought-provoking contribution. I have spent all but 50 years thinking andwriting about liberty and its hazardous relationship with the nation-state. I had become confident that there was little that I did not know about it. Wrong! Smith forced me to think afresh about the concept of national sovereign and about the dishonest role of Thomas Hobbes in setting the stage for its dominance in the post-1648 Treaty of Westphalia world-order. Likewise, he taught me to think anew about the full significance of closed borders for those individuals who find themselves on the wrong side of the barbed wire-- the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. And that is quite something for an Englishman who himself migrated in middle-age from the Old World to the New.

Smith claims that he writes as both a rationalist and a spokesman for tradition. If you think that these two forces are incompatible, read his book and discover that you are incorrect. Much more important than this welding together of pre- and post-Enlightenment thinking, however, is the energizing pulse of morality that flows through the entire book. This is not the work of a skeptic, of someone who is disenchanted with the world in which he resides. This is not some depressing backward glance at Come Nineveh, Come Tyre. Rather it is a vibrant anticipation that looks forward, with the Promise of Joy to a world order not unlike that which graced Western civilization prior to the Great War: an environment of largely peaceful nations and open borders; an environment without passports and border guards; an environment fully understandble to John Locke, but utterly incomprehensible to Thomas Hobbes.

I do not endorse every proposal that Smith incorporates into this book. But where I disagree, I do so more circumspectly now than before I followed his arguments through to their logical conclusion. It is a book written to be read, and to be read profitably, by all individuals of good heart and good cheer.

Once again, a very complimentary comment, but with a reservation-- "I do not endorse every proposal that Smith incorporates into this book..."  If even these quite friendly readers have reservations, I can only expect to encounter much more resistance, disagreement, and disbelief as the book spreads to areas where the climate of opinion is less favorable to the somewhat libertarian cast of mind in the book. However, it is clear from Rowley's comment in particular that I succeeded in my stated goal of communicating a position. By contrast, MS's remark in the last comment thread was disappointing because it suggested that I had not succeeded:

Nathan, you already know that I don't agree with your ideas about community and its requirements, but I also can't accept the natural rights premises on which you build your whole argument. Since you have to accept the beginning premises to accept the rest, you lose me right at the start.

There are a number of reasons why this is an inadequate response to the book. First, it's an overstatement to say that the whole argument is built on natural rights premises. I do assert and emphasize them, but I make other kinds of arguments too. Second, since I argue and lay the foundations for natural rights at least to some extent, it's not quite fair to act as if I just treat it as an indubitable premise. I would hope an interlocutor would feel the need to argue why my case for natural rights doesn't work. Third, since I make the case for the free society mainly on natural rights grounds, I was hoping that readers would see that if they want to reject my argument, but nonetheless to believe in a free society, they must provide some alternative account of what a free society is and why it is right. Perhaps some will realize they are unable to do so, and decide to accept my argument after all. It was partly in this way that I have come to accept natural rights in the past three or four years, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue had, for a while, made me disbelieve in them.

MS's next response, however, was much more satisfactory: she directed me to "Nonsense and Natural law," by Steven D. Smith. (It took me a while to find it, and I don't think there's an ungated copy anywhere; I eventually got access to it at HeinOnline.) It was a delight to read Smith's clear and intelligently-written and often funny article, in which I quickly recognized an early version of the lines of thinking that eventually became Law's Quandary, another book to which I am much indebted. "Nonsense and Natural Law" is arguing against Roger Pilon of the Cato Institute, a former colleague of mine. However, it quickly became clear that my account of natural rights is not vulnerable to Smith's argument. Here is how Professor Smith's article begins:

We cannot make sense of the Constitution, or of the ways in which we talk about the Constitution, unless we understand the Constitution from within a natural law-natural rights framework. That is the critical part of Roger Pilon's argument, and although the argument raises complex questions I want for now to accept it. But I also want to suggest that this claim points to a dilemma that lies at the heart of the subject of this conference. The first prong of the dilemma is that, as Dr. Pilon has argued, we cannot make sense of a good deal of constitutional discourse outside of a natural law-natural rights framework. The second prong of the dilemma is that we cannot talk sensibly about the Constitution from within a natural law-natural rights framework; that is because this sort of framework gains its sense  from a worldview that is no longer permitted us. The unhappy conclusion, it seems, is that we cannot talk sensibly about the Constitution.

The concession that "we cannot make sense of... constitutional discourse outside of a natural law-natural rights framework" is very useful for me, in that (a) it makes the alternatives to my own emphasis on natural rights unappealing, (b) it concedes that I am in good company, namely that of the founders of the American polity-- and I think, but Smith can correct me if I am wrong, also that of the 17th-century Whigs who founded the constitution of modern liberal Britain and shaped the emergence of the Anglo-American common law.

But what does Smith mean by "we cannot talk sensibly... from within a natural law... framework?"  The italics on we are extremely important here.  Smith argues that one talks nonsense if the words one uses presuppose concepts in which one does not believe.  He then shows that Thomas Jefferson and others of his time believed in a "Great Chain of Being" philosophy according to which Providence made the world and everything in it has purpose and meaning that emanate from Providence, and that it was in this context that their ideas of natural rights made sense. Then Smith argues:

The preceding discussion has suggested that for the Jeffersonians, natural rights were closely connected with a Creator who conferred such rights on human beings. But were these theistic trappings actually necessary to Jeffersonian rights discourse? Perhaps the same basic ideas and the same basic discourse could flourish as well or even better if the providential wrappings were discarded.

The question is urgent because, to the Jeffersonian, the providence-centered worldview is no longer authoritative in legal and academic contexts; appeals to God or to the providential design are not admissible. James Boyd White has observed: "[There is a] peculiar division between academic and religious thought in our culture. In the academic world we tend to speak as though all participants in our conversations were purely rational actors engaged in rational debate; perhaps some people out there in the world are sufficiently benighted that they turn to religious beliefs or other superstitions, but that is not true of us or, if it is true, we hide it, and it ought not be true of them. Ours is a secular academy and, we think, a secular state."

Hence, if rights discourse makes sense only within the providence centered worldview, then it would follow that if we continue to engage in this discourse we are talking nonsense-at least, relative to us.

But this argument does not apply to me.  I do not accept the obligation of thinking about law in purely secular terms.  I accept a providence-centered worldview, and (I think) some version of the Great Chain of Being philosophy, though I would try to avoid being as naive in applying as Smith shows Jefferson sometimes to have been.  And I would have thought that MS would also accept a Providence-centered worldview, no?  So I don't see how she is in a position to appeal to Professor Smith's argument.

To this I would add two things.  First, it seems important to reject, or at least to qualify, Smith's notion of law as originating in the commands of a sovereign.

Probably the most familiar and understandable account of "law" views law as a set of commands or rules or directives issued by an authoritative sovereign or lawgiver. This conception is conspicuous in our images of law, modern and ancient: We imagine Congress passing laws for the citizens of this country, Solon giving laws to the Athenians, God giving the law to Moses and Moses in turn giving it to the people of Israel. Conversely, when we try to imagine "law" without reference to any lawgiver or legislator, the notion becomes hazy or mystical-Holmes' "brooding omnipresence in the sky."

Not surprisingly, therefore, most theories of law include a legislator as an essential element. This element is perhaps most central in a positivist theory such as John Austin's: Law consists of the general commands of the sovereign.' But even in theories different than or critical of Austin's, the lawgiver typically plays a necessary role. Thus, Thomas Aquinas defined law as "an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated." The legislator is only one element in this definition, but he is nonetheless an essential one.

Smith thinks law must necessarily originate in sovereignty; I would say that sovereignty must necessarily originate in law. Barack Obama can order US troops into Afghanistan. I can order them to leave. But Obama's command has the force of law and mine does not. Why? To say Obama is in a position of sovereign authority begs the question. What does that mean and how did that situation occur? At the risk of sounding flippant, let me suggest that the only answers to that question will involve some kind of "brooding omnipresence in the sky."

Second, I would suggest that the ontological skepticism which Smith provisionally accepts as a condition for participation in the secular academy is not just a threat to law, but to any kind of ethics or morality. I do not see how it is any easier to give a secular account of ethics than it is to give a secular account of natural law. Indeed, I am not sure that there is any difference between the two projects. And if it's clear that we can't without ethics, why should we try to do without natural law?

David Brooks:

Before he allegedly went off on his shooting rampage in Tucson, Jared Loughner listed some of his favorite books on his YouTube page. These included: “Animal Farm,” “Brave New World,” “Alice in Wonderland,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Through the Looking Glass” and “The Communist Manifesto.” Many of these books share a common theme: individuals trying to control their own thoughts and government or some other force trying to take that control away.

Loughner also made a series of videos. These, too, suggest that he was struggling to control his own mind. Just before his killing spree, Loughner made one called “My Final Thoughts.” In it he writes about different levels of consciousness and dreaming. He tries to build a rigid structure to organize his thinking. He uses the word “currency” as a metaphor for an inner language to make sense of the world.

“You create and distribute your new currency, listener?” the video asks. “You don’t allow the government to control your grammar structure, listener?”

All of this evidence, which is easily accessible on the Internet, points to the possibility that Loughner may be suffering from a mental illness like schizophrenia. The vast majority of schizophrenics are not violent, and those that receive treatment are not violent. But as Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, a research psychiatrist, writes in his book, “The Insanity Offense,” about 1 percent of the seriously mentally ill (or about 40,000 individuals) are violent. They account for about half the rampage murders in the United States.

Other themes from Loughner’s life fit the rampage-killer profile. He saw himself in world historical terms. He appeared to have a poor sense of his own illness (part of a condition known as anosognosia). He had increasingly frequent run-ins with the police. In short, the evidence before us suggests that Loughner was locked in a world far removed from politics as we normally understand it.

Yet the early coverage and commentary of the Tucson massacre suppressed this evidence. The coverage and commentary shifted to an entirely different explanation: Loughner unleashed his rampage because he was incited by the violent rhetoric of the Tea Party, the anti-immigrant movement and Sarah Palin.

And yet it's hard to believe that the fact that these two episodes of unprovoked violence against the innocent-- SB1070 and Loughner's murders-- both took place in Arizona is just a coincidence.

The Auto Bailout Worked

Detroit auto show highlights rebirth for Ford, GM, Chrysler (CNN Money):

As the auto industry gathers for the annual Detroit Auto Show, the outlook is for strong sales gains ahead, both domestically and globally. In 2010, U.S. sales rose 11%, and they're expected to be up at least that much in 2011...

A few years ago, Detroit automakers spent an extra several thousand dollars per vehicle on production compared to import brands. But that disadvantage has largely vanished, mostly due to the closing of 19 auto plants in recent years, and new labor contracts that trimmed costs.

"Certainly in terms of getting their footprint of production to match the market, they're probably in the best position we've seen in 20 or 30 years," said William Strauss, senior economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. "That bodes well in terms of profitability."

In the sales boom years, the Big Three took losses on many of their car models due to weak demand. But experts say that new cost structures and more attractive offerings in car models position them to weather changes in the market.

Rebecca Lindland, director of strategic review for IHS Automotive, said even conservative estimates of sales growth to 15 million vehicles a year in 2015, should be enough to drive significantly higher profits.

"It's been decades since they made money on something other than trucks and SUV's," she said. "But they're structured well now."

The same kind of radical alteration of cost structure is exactly what we now need to do to the federal government.

Iraq => Southern Sudan?

"Southern Sudan's Historic Independence Referendum" (The Daily Beast):

“After all of the struggle, loss of life, separation, and killing, we can see that we are now allowed to vote freely for our destiny,” Valentino Achak Deng told me in the southern capital city of Juba, along the banks of the Nile. Deng, the subject of a “fictionalized memoir” by Dave Eggers, What Is the What?, helped tell the story of the Lost Boys and the suffering of Southern Sudan. Now he is both witnessing and participating in a new chapter in the deeply troubled history of the region, this one framed by hope for peace and stability. “We’re going to vote in large numbers, together, and then just look at our faces and our eyes and be happy,” Deng said.

At stake in the seven-day referendum is the separation of Africa’s largest state into two sovereign states. The divisions between the Muslim and Arab-dominated government in the north and the Christian and African tribal populations of the south have been festering since end of colonial rule in 1956. In 1983, those tensions erupted into a 20-year civil war that killed 2.5 million people. As North and South negotiated a peace treaty that would be signed in 2005, Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, began a genocide against Muslims in Darfur, a western province of Sudan; he has since been indicted by the International Criminal Court for his crimes there.

The Bush administration negotiated the comprehensive peace agreement of 2005 and set Jan. 9, 2011, as the date of a Southern Sudan referendum to decide the fate of the two-state solution.

Here's something I would be interested to know: Did the Iraq War improve the Bush administration's negotiating position in arranging this? You can easily imagine how it might. If you're Omar al-Bashir in 2005, you might well think, "If I say no to America; if I try to hold onto southern Sudan by force at the cost of committing more war crimes; will I end up like Saddam? Is it worth the risk?"

The Iraq War did not improve the West's ability to deal with a country like Russia, which (a) is too big and nuclear, and (b) isn't totalitarian/genocidal enough to be a candidate for regime change. But it may have created a decisive credible threat against small-scale tyrants and totalitarians. Time will tell.

An Epistemological Parable

A murder has taken place. Mr. Faith claims that he was an eyewitness, and that the killer had fiery red hair; a short, pointed beard; and a scar on his left hand. However, Mr. Faith's account of who he is and how he happened to be near the scene is muddled and full of inconsistencies, and his whole demeanor and manner of speaking are more than a little odd. During cross-examination, only those three details are consistent: otherwise, he mumbles and seems to contradict himself.

Four detectives are investigating the case: (1) Induction-Skeptic, (2) Solipsist, (3) Atheist, and (4) Believer. Believer decides that Mr. Faith, despite his strangeness, is trustworthy, and that the murderer is a bearded redhead with a scarred hand. Induction-Skeptic decides Mr. Faith is unreliable, and discounts all his evidence. Solipsist's impression is that Mr. Faith really did see the red hair, but that he might have imagined the scar and the beard. Atheist believes in the red hair and the beard, but not the scar.

The above is not an especially brilliant parable, but it might give some idea of why I think dogmatic scientific materialists are so misguided. The red hair, beard, and scar represent:

1. There is order in the world.
2. There are other people (like me) in the world.
3. There is a God.

I could call these propositions, although I am reluctant even to do that, since to assert a proposition generally involves conjoining already-known concepts to assert that one possible state of the world holds, whereas in (1), (2), and (3) the function of the sentence is to allude to a concept-- order, people, God-- which is not fully comprehended and never can be. To call them evocations of mystery might be as accurate as to call them statements. Thus, it is a fool's errand to define "order." Why, of a vast array of possibilities for arranging data or matter, do a tiny fraction seem to us "orderly" and the rest "chaotic?" One can only evoke intuition here; not define. And of course, even if we take the concept of order as given, there's Hume's problem of induction, or (the same thing in another form) the "grue" problem, to show that no amount of evidence is any use unless the existence of order-- whatever that is-- is pre-assumed. Similarly with other people: to say just what we mean by a person would exhaust the efforts of the greatest philosophers in history without coming close to the comprehensiveness needed for a real, proper definition. And when it comes to God, too, we can only hint and evoke; everyone sort of knows what we mean, but definition is elusive. In each case, we are faced with something indefinable that the mind feels mysteriously impelled to accept, but cannot logically prove.

Suppose now that Atheist, while continuing to regard Induction-Skeptic and Solipsist as excessively scrupulous for doubting the red hair and the beard, turns on Believer, a bit contemptuously, and challenges him to account for his indefensible credulity in accepting evidence given by the obviously unreliable Mr. Faith. Here we have the type of the scientific materialist.

Behind the Hunches

I'm not really a macroeconomist, and I don't engage in ongoing analysis of the newest macroeconomic data. Nor do I have such an outstanding record of successful predictions that anyone would be clamoring to hear how I do it. Still, I suppose there's no harm in jotting down the proto-theory that lies behind the hunches I've had about the economy over the past couple of years, which although I've made no effort to test it formally, I have the impression fits the facts reasonably well.

It is this that growth depends mainly on (a) expectations about (b) institutions and policies. The private sector is the source of productivity and growth, but not really of macroeconomic fluctuations, since the law of large numbers swamps the effects of particular firms' decisions and developments in technology. Technologies big enough to affect the macroeconomy single-handedly-- the internet; I hope in the future airships-- are rare, and play out too slowly to affect short-term fluctuations. While I don't want to rule out bubbles and other self-generating cyclical phenomena, I think macreconomic fluctuations usually originate in politics, but the causal connections are diverse and complicated, and depend much more on the future direction of policy than on the political configuration at a given time.

In 2008, the crisis was provoked by (a) the defeat of immigration reform, which undermined housing demand, which caused prices to fall, broke the banks, etc., and (b) the impending political resurgence (already begun in the 2006 mid-terms) of unreconstructed (not Clintonite) Big Government paleoliberal Democrats. This was a more disastrous configuration of indicators for the future than America has seen in a generation. The prospect and then the passage of Obamacare, and the mis-named "stimulus" bill, hindered recovery in 2009-10. Now, the Republican resurgence in the polls, and then elections, in the second half of last year, and most recently the tax deal, has reshaped expectations for the future direction of policy back towards normalcy, and business investment should recover, and with it the economy. One caveat however: immigration reform is badly needed, to revive housing prices and to keep Big Government in check, and on this the Republicans are, by and large, wrong wrong wrong. If there are signs of Republicans moving towards the center on this, my hunch-- and I won't claim there's any great reason to put much value on it-- is that the medium-term economic future is bright.