Marat

The law always operates with broad categories and bright line distinctions since it has to operate as an efficient system of public administration, and it also has to command general assent. Both of these goals would be undermined if law tried to be scientific and make fine distinctions to reflect the continuous degrees of variation in moral capacity throughout the society. To be truly scientific in measuring the genuine moral responsibility of people, the law would have to vary by the IQ, education, socio-economic background, race, gender, adrenalin and testosterone levels, neuroanatomy, and culture of the offender, until we finally had a legal system that was more a measure of what the offender was than of what he had done. If the law serves justice, it has to vindicate the right. If a criminal by his act violates the right, the role of the state, as the embodiment of justice, has to be to negate the implicit vindication of the wrong by the criminal. This means that the state must inflict a punishment on the offender which cancels the offender's cancellation of the rights of others, since only a cancellation of a cancellation of right is just. In the case of murder, since the murderer has cancelled the full right to exist in another person, the only way for the state to vindicate the right of innocent people to exist is to cancel the full right of the murderer to exist. To do anything less would devalue the innocent victim's right to exist and would display the state as lacking in respect for innocent human life. (This is what G. W. F. Hegel says, anyway.)

Wittgenstein's theory of language, or the whole philosophical movement of positivism, are important aids to the discussion here. The basic idea is that we cannot establish the REAL possibility of anything just by imagining it and then expecting it to do any work in settling public debates, which have to operate on empirical data we can all access and logical reasoning from that data which we can all understand. I can imagine that my computer operates by being powered by invisible ghosts which no empirical test can ever detect, but this act of imagination does nothing establish the real possibility that that is how my computer operates. Before we can establish the real possibility of anything, such that it has weight against empirical data or logical reasoning, it must also have the support of tangible empirical data or be implied by some necessary conceptual consequence of such empirical data. Now the possibility which you imagine can reconcile God's goodness with the fact of evil is that even in cases where we cannot detect by empirical evidence or by logical inference from the available empirical evidence that some particular evil has an ultimately benevolent or redemptive quality, there is still some secret, hidden connection which we cannot detect by empirical evidence or reasoning from that evidence between that apparent evil and the good consequences which excuse it. But such an imaginary possibility is unsupported by the type of reasons which are required to give it weight in an argument conducted within the sphere of public reason, where things count as real reasons, real doubts, and real possibilities only if they are based in tangible empirical evidence or logical inference from that evidence. When you say it is still possible that the apparent evil we see may be redeemed by some subterranean connection of events, I can just as easily counter that by saying that it is also possible that the evil we see won't be redeemed by some subterranean connection of events. So the only concrete thing we are left with which has some real, empirical weight is the fact of evil which has no apparent excuse we can discern.

Since the minimum age for legal consent to sexual intercourse varies greatly from one time and place to another, you can only answer the question whether it is illegal for two 14-year-olds to have sex if you specify the legal jurisdiction and the date. But generally 14 is regarded is below the age for legal consent to sex, even though both children in the example may in fact feel and say that they are consenting to sex with each other. Many of the laws regarding minimum age for sexual consent were set back in the 19th century, when malnutrition and ricketts delayed puberty until 17 or so. Now puberty is occurring earlier and earlier, so teenagers are being required to wait four or five years after becoming sexual in fact before being allowed to be sexual by law, in contrast to the situation in the 19th century, when they were legally allowed to be sexual at about the age that they felt biologically ready for it. But why is it legal for children to make contracts to supply them with 'necessaries,' that is, things like food and clothing, even when they are very young, but not legal for them to choose to be sexual, which is also a necessary biological drive which demands fulfillment as much as hunger does. There lurks in the background of all these laws to 'protect' children from acting out their sexual feelings in sex with a partner the pre-modern assumption that sex is bad and so children have to be protected from it. But even though eating too much food is bad for children, and probably much more risky to health than having sex at a young age, there is no legal prohibition for children eating as much as they like, but if children consent to underage sex bourgeois society and its legal system go hysterical as though the children had swallowed a bottle of poison.

But to show that suffering is beneficial or redemptive you have to show how links between such things as a child dying in an isolated forest by being torn apart by wolves shortly after birth from a dead mother -- even though no one sees this nor does the newborn learn any lessons from this -- and some good outcome are not only possible or likely, but even necessary, since the least unnecessary evil in the world is inconsistent with the God hypothesis. I can't conceive of any way that that links between the putative newborn's suffering and some benefitical or redemptive outcome could ever be demonstrated without making some equally unprovable assumptions about a magical sort of knowledge of how such disparate things in the universe are connected or how these can be shown to be necessary. If we start by assuming that God exists then it would also follow that the newborn's suffering must be beneficial, but we can't start there and convince an audience which does not already believe in God.

Perhaps the reason is that people sufficiently critical to leave their religion are also more perceptive, critical, and willing to call something bad when it is, so they are also more critical of and honest about their state of health. People who need religion so much that they remain in their beliefs may be the sort of people who are afraid of admitting that institutions are inadequate, even when they are, and so they are similarly reluctant to admit that their health is bad when it is. Also, leaving a religion is stressful, even if it is ultimately the right thing to do, and stress can cause illness. Studies of stress show that positive changes like getting married or getting a new job can be stressful.

We are free to make many personal choices which vitally concern our own interests even though these choices may harm other people. I can marry someone of a different religion even though my mother will have a heart attack if I do; I can raise the prices of the goods my factory sells just to make myself richer, even though this will impose great hardships on poor consumers who need those goods; I can become an alcoholic and deprive the community of the benefit of all the state-supported education that was pumped into me, etc. So since choosing to commit suicide or not is the most vitally important personal decision we can possibly make, at least according to Existentialists and Hamlet, why should the much less weighty side-effects on others of that vital excercise of personal autonomy override that autonomy? That makes about as much sense as saying that because my next door neighbor is amused by my funny-looking glasses, I should decline to accept the much better job I have been offered 200 miles away, since then he would not have the chance to chuckle at me once a week when we cross paths to take our rubbish out to the curb at the same time. The analogy with helping someone 'avoid injury' by offering to tie his shoes assumes that the person committing suicide is always necessarily producing a net injury for himself. Since many forms of life are hideous (would you rather live to be 80 and die in your sleep, or live to be 81 and spend your last year being slowly tortured to death?), people may feel that the 'injury' they face is continuing to live, rather than escaping a horrible life for the merciful oblivion of death.

I think 'hallucination' was the right word, since the speaker seemed to be describing an actual sensation of the real presence of Christ in his life. Christians often claim that they know that Christ is real because they have direct, inner experience of his presence which is so convicing phenomenologically that they cannot doubt it. But in this conviction they ignore statements in the Bible which warn that the Devil may often appear to the mind in the guise of something holy, so I wonder how they can be so sure on the basis of a mere sensation that they are not just indulging in wish fulfillment, cultural delusion, or self-serving self-deception. The proper attitude to take is to insist of all the odd convictions and sensations that spontaneously sweep through the mind and at least temporarily suggest to us that we have reached some strange or unique insight is that they be held up to the standards of rationality, and if they are consistent with it, they can be provisionally accepted as genuine revelations, but otherwise not. The OP raises the interesting question generally of why people are condemned for ridiculing religious belief, when greeting Holocaust deniers or global warming deniers with hoots of derision is considered just fine. People hold many beliefs quite dearly, and just as some people may be crushed by being told that others find their belief in the Sun God stupid, others may burst into tears if you make fun of their belief in a flat earth. For some reason religion still maintains a hold on our secular age by its continued ability to insist that we respect everyone's religious beliefs, even though we can freely ridicule all their other beliefs.

Needimprovement: When you say that "one of God's attributes is his eternal nature," it sounds as though you are trying to revive the old ontological argument for the existence of God, which is that since he is defined as perfect, and a non-existent thing would have an imperfection, he must exist, just by virtue of his definition. But Kant, among others, shot that down by insisting that the question of the existence of something always stands outside the definition of it, and refers to the status of the entire thing after it is defined. Otherwise you could define some X as a 'perfect island,' and since it would not be perfect unless it existed, a perfect island must exist. Public reason, that is, the neutral form of argumentation which can be used between people who accept differing world views, has to be based on logical inference and positivism. Positivism is the principle of reasoning followed in natural science, which states that for something to be treated as real, it either has to be directly empirically testable through some specified operations which can be performed on things we can all see, feel, hear, and measure, or it has to be a necessary conceptual implication of what can be empirically tested. But in your attempt to explain away the evil which God allows to exist in the world, you argue that the evil in the world is all necessary for some higher purposes or unavoidable reasons which we cannot understand. But since this assertion cannot itself be empirically demonstrated, it can only claim explanatory power under positivist principles of reasoning if it is a necessary conceptual implication of something else which can be empirically demonstrated. But since the only thing you offer in support of the assumption that all the evil in the world will turn out to have been no more than necessary is the existence of a good God, whose existence cannot be empirically demonstrated, then you can't prove that the evil in the world is no more or worse than necessary. You can claim that you know some things by faith or revelation, but since these sources of knowledge are not available to all those with whom you are discussing the issue, they cannot claim to be part of public reason or public argument.

You have to take a step back on this entire question and first ask what is the difference between 'explaining' something and providing the cause of something. Sure, we can in principle demonstrate all the biological correlates of the experience of falling in love, but does this really 'explain' the peculiar feeling rather than just specify a list of physical processes which run parallel to that feeling? Perhaps a poem by Keats comes closer to explaining love than the specification of the changes in vasopressin and serotonin levels that accompany the sensation of love.

But what if that person is profoundly disabled and perhaps confined to an iron lung with no capacity to do anything but move a pencil with their lips? Should the state grant them an effective means to enforce their right to commit suicide by giving their suicide helper exemption from the criminal laws against murder?

Healthy males can have a hemoglobin level varyng from 140 up to 180, though there is a gradual decline with age. Most medical textbooks will tell you that an otherwise healthy male patient with a hemoglobin of 130 is anemic and requires some treatment, usually in the form of iron supplements. In supportive cancer therapy, several studies have indicated that increasing patients' hemoglobin levels with erythropoietin either close to or even all the way up to the lower end of the normal range produces important benefits in quality of life. This seems logical, since evolution would not have threatened the survival of the species by creating a demand for calories to support a statistically normal hemoglobin level that was higher than necessary for optimal functioning. However, for some reason in renal medicine it is almost universally assumed that the correction of male patients' hemoglobin levels to the 110-120 range is 'just fine,' and if the patients complain about feeling exhausted all the time, they are simply scolded and told that this is all due to other factors, such as post-dialysis hypotension, the toxic effects of uremia, or just their imagination. The obvious reason for this approach is that in many subclasses of renal patients the correction of anemia with erythropoietin to near-normal levels can cause fistula-clotting, strokes, and heart attacks, so it is all too tempting for nephrologists to convince themselves that the pitiful hemoglobin levels they can safely achieve are adequate. I would recommend, however, that nephrologists take a more careful look at the literature and realize that there are many subclasses of renal patients who can safely tolerate higher levels of hemoglobin, and that even for those who cannot, nephrologists should be prepared to admit that what they can offer is inadequate.

Needimprovement, when you rhetorically ask, "How can we determine what amounts to unnecessary suffering from the standpoint of eternity," you make the mistake of accepting as already proven exactly what is still in dispute, which is the existence of a Deity which permits us to treat the 'standpoint of eternity' as a real perspective able to create real problems for philosophical arguments. But until we have established that God exists, the 'standpoint of eternity' which could make it really impossible to determine whether any particular suffering was ultimately necessary or justified or not is simply not available as a context to impeach any reasoning based on ordinary, human-scale, empirical data. So as far as we can understand the concepts of cause, effect, necessary suffering, and unnecessary suffering, the Haitian earthquake doesn't seem necessary, redeemed by other forces, or excused by some distant good it produces by any ordinary reasoning we can apply. An example of an empirically testable instance in which an evil, say the pain of a vaccination, would be justified by the ultimate good caused by it, say immunity against some much worse infection, shows what could count as a real reason for excusing evil. But to posit that if we could somehow see all the intricate interconnections of the causal strands of the universe we would realize that the world would be a much worse place if Kennedy hadn't been assassinated on November 22, 1963 just amounts to supporting one fantasy, the existence of a magical being, God, by another fantasy, our ability to know that a causal network we cannot comprehend can somehow provide a sufficient support for a miraculous being like God.

Of course we generally do some things already which have the effect of preventive medicine, such as observing the rules of basic sanitation, eating a healthy diet, getting sufficient sunlight, etc. Any textbook of the history of medicine will tell you that the great advances in life expectancy and health from the early 19th century to today were achieved not by advances in medical technology but by improvements in basic public health measures such as better sanitation, diet, and swamp draining, which eliminated problems such as typhoid, typhus, cholera, ricketts, malaria, etc. But my concern is with how much improvement in health and reduction of medical costs we can realistically expect to achieve by additional preventive medicine measures being proposed now, which so many politicians seem to assume will be enormous. I doubt that any gains will be significant, and for three reasons: First, the benefits of exercise, dietary interventions, and certain screening tests have been well known for the last 40 years, but since there is a limit as to how cooperative people are willing to be with such programs, there is no reason to expect that compliance with these recommendations will now suddenly improve. Second, the greatest burden on human health in the Western world today, both in suffering and cost, is in the chronic diseases listed in the OP which cannot be prevented. This is a most curious era in medical history, since as we are coming to know more and more about the importance of genetics in determining our health, we are also, paradoxically, insisting more and more stridently that preventive measures will make a huge contribution to health. Third, there is a massive cost both to the quality of life of patients and to the costs of the healthcare system in medical interventions to manage chronic illness and at least moderate if not prevent their worst sequelae. More intensive daily dialysis for renal patients, for example, improves outcomes, but it utterly destroys the quality of patients' lives and costs the healthcare system a massive amount of money. Intensive management of blood glucose in diabetics cuts the quality of patients' lives in half with repeated blood sugar testing, carbohydrate counting, and insulin injections every single day, and it triples the number of potentially catastrophic or even lethal hypoglycemic episodes. True, it also reduces long-term vascular and neurological lesions, but the monetary cost of the required pumps, continuous glucose monitors, diabetes educators' time, medical appointments, emergency room visits for hypoglycemic episodes, as well as the cost to the patients' quality of life is so great that it may well outweigh the benefits. Similar points could be made for the management strategies of many other diseases, which the preventive medicine movement rather simplistically evaluates solely in terms of their benefits rather than more realistically assesses in terms of their balance between costs and benefits.

But it seems that the very idea of an equal competition in any area of life is an idealization which never corresponds to reality. Thus suppose we have a group of male athletes in a race, but one, who on a good day is better than the rest, had the flu two weeks ago and is still not perfectly recovered from it, so while he cannot claim the flu as an excuse deserving compensation in the race, since he no longer suffers from it, it still limits his performance. Another grew up wealthy and could afford the best coaches and the best running courses, while most of his competitors never had these aids. Still another had his will to race undermined by parents who regarded athletics as a waste of time, since they wanted him to be a concert pianist and felt that racing was a disgustingly physical activity. Another contestant lived in the mountains of Kenya all his life where his lungs were trained to oxygenate his body in a very thin atmosphere, so that now when he races in the Boston Marathon, it is as though he were being flooded with oxygen in a hyperbaric chamber, so he does much better. A final contestant has a natural hemoglobin level of 180, while the average among the others is 150. Do any of these competitors deserve their advantages or disadvantages? Of course not. But what is a competitor? Is it the person who now stands before us, with all of his unfair, undeserved advantages and disadvantages already built into him, and the whole person now regarded as the entity who deserves the outcome he can get in the race or not? Or should we laboriously go through the entire list of unearned advantages and disadvantages and attempt to iron them out by having the runners carry different weights, such as they do with horses to make horse racing more competitive? The problem with trying to iron out all the differences is that we can never track down all the unfair pluses and minuses in a person's history, so the outcome of the race will depend on which factors we notice and can measure, rather than on what the ultimate kernel of 'real will' and 'real personal desert' inside the person deserves. This is also the problem with affirmative action programs generally: They set out to make things equal by addressing only broad racial categories and trying to compensate for those, while ignoring all the other factors which affect performance as though every other influence on performance througout life were fair.

But to focus the discussion more clearly, the problem is that since God is by hypothesis perfectly good, omnipotent, and omniscient, he cannot coexist with a world he has created which has any more evil in it than is absolutely necessary for purposes of moral instruction for humans or for etribution for the evil actions arising from human free will. Now it seems easy to say that if people choose to smoke and then they develop cancer, then that is their just desert for doing what they knew they shouldn't do. A problem arises, however, with the fact that this punishment is much too terrible for the mere human frailty of lacking self-control when faced with the opportunity of self-medicating for nervous symptoms by smoking. Any human who willed cancer on another human because that person was so weak as to smoke despite the warnings against it would be regarded as a vicious monster. And yet religious people want to say that when God designs the universe with these punishments built into it, he somehow still remains not just better than a vicious monster, not just good, but even infinitely good. But the problems for the God hypothesis become even more acute when we look at earthly evils which seem to have absolutely no connection with evil human free choice, such as hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, terrible genetic illnesses striking newborns, etc. To render these challenges consistent with the theory that the omnipotent God is also infinitely good, we have to assume that earthquakes are caused in some mysterious, mystical way by evil exercises of human free will. But then we find ourselves in the ridiculous position of trying to support the existence of one magical, mysterious entity, God, by positing the existence of another magical, mysterious entity, which is some incomprehensible causal link between evil exercises of human free will and earthquakes. This is as bad as saying that we know that Santa Claus exists because the Easter Bunny says so. A mysterious entity can only be rendered more plausible by its existence being supported by a significanly less mysterious entity, not by an equally mysterious one.

Needimprovement: The defense of the apparent evil of God that you offer -- that he is infinitely superior to us so we cannot know what logic prompts him to act as he does and we cannot claim to hold him morally responsible to us -- makes the classical logical error of petitio principii, or assuming the reality of what is in question. Since we are trying to understand how to make the evil which God allows to exist in the world, which does not seem logically necessitated by any project he could have which is consistent with his nature, somehow consistent with God's essential quality of being perfectly good, we can't solve that problem just by asserting that his ways exceed our puny intellects and he owes us no moral duties in any case. If we are going to accept those conclusions as premisses of the argument, the argument is over before it starts, so there is nothing to discuss.

There is a massive campaign today to save healthcare costs and improve healthcare outcomes by focusing on preventive medicine rather than just treating disease after it occurs, when care becomes more expensive and health becomes more difficult to restore. But the simple fact is that most of the truly serious diseases which cost the healthcare system the most money and which are most devastating to human health, well-being, and life cannot be prevented by any known means. Cystic fibrosis, lupus, type 1 diabetes and a host of autoimmune diseases, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, Tay-Sachs disease, muscular dystrophy, more than half of all cases of renal failure and heart disease, genetic cancers or cancers of unknown origin, and many neurological disorders are simply beyond the capacity of medical science to prevent. Other major diseases such as type 2 diabetes are very heavily genetically conditioned, so while their development can be delayed or moderated, they often cannot be entirely prevented. While it is sometimes argued that even though many serious illnesses cannot be prevented, at least preventive medicine can moderate their course by early intervention, but here too, the intensive management of these diseases can be very expensive and can also produce dangerous side-effects which are themselves effectively disease states, so not much is gained by preventive strategies. Ultimately the early and intensive management of unpreventable illnesses will fail in many cases to prevent chronic illnesses from becoming worse. In many cases the effectiveness of interventions to prevent or manage disease is overestimated because the ability of the patients to comply with these interventions itself only measures their better initial health. Thus older people who can exercise are the ones who are already stronger and healthier, probably for genetic reasons, so this is why exercise correlates with health in older people, rather than exercise itself being the cause of their better health. But given that the scientific evidence that preventive medicine is so important is lacking, why is it such a pervasive recommendation in healthcare policy discussions? One reason is that if preventive healthcare were really very effective, it would support the right-wing argument that the government should not spend much money on public healthcare, since disease is all the patient's fault anyway and could be avoided quite cheaply by just telling people how to behave. Another reason is that if patients could themselves prevent disease by doing what medicine told them to do, disease could be blamed on patients, thus relieving the medical profession of blame for the stagnation of medical progress in recent years, with polio being the last major disease to be conquered nearly 60 years ago.

"Okay folks, now that we're all one country, how many of you would like to move to Westchester County New York or to Beverly Hills California? All right, that's 5.999 billion. And now how many of you would like to move to the malaria-ridden swamps of Gambia, where you can eek out an income of $3 a day if you're a good entrepreneur and work hard? Let's see, that's ... Oh come on, somebody must be willing to sign up for Gambia, otherwise the planet's going to be too crowded in some places and too sparsely populated in others!" But even if people agree to move freely from the first to the third world, the essential problem remains, which is that in a democratic society of six billion people, no one is going to stand for the unified budget of that world government being distributed in such a way that it preserves the income differential of the present world, where something like 90% of the weath is controlled by the richest 10% of the population. Instead, the democratic majority is going to require considerable evening-out of that wealth differential, which would set off a revolution among the haves which would quickly restore the multinational world we now live in. The wealthy of America today fiercely resist giving up the Bush tax cuts, but just imagine what they would do if they had to face the wealth redistributing pressures not of 300 million Americans earning an average income of $45,000 a year, but of nearly six trillion people earning $2 a day! The stresses would be beyond anything that could be resolved within a single state.

But consider the thugee culture of southern Pakistan in the 16th century. This was a group which traced its origins to a single, common tribe and which had its own distinct cultural practises. It lived by infiltrating caravans transporting goods along the route between the Middle East and India, and once it had joined up with a caravan, the thugees would pull out their knotted cloths and, in special a technique they had developed, quickly strangle all the traders and steal their goods before their victims knew what was happening to them. They flourished until the British eventually wiped them out in the 19th century. Now would it be fair to embark on a campaign to eliminate the thugees (from whom we derive the modern English word 'thug') as an evil ethnic group, or to express prejudicial views against them, or to make the assumption that every thugee we meet is quite likely a dangerous criminal? We have to accept that nature, history, and culture are not moral forces, and so they can operate to produce an entire race, culture, religion, or ethnic group whose members are so consistently evil that we would be foolish not to assume, in our own defense and for the protection of our society, that they are evil. On the other hand we have our legal and moral idealization which says that we have to treat everyone with respect and presume that all people are equal, and that no one is an evil person unless we can prove that he is, even if he belongs to the thugee tribe whose members were trained as robbers and murderers from childhood. Which should win out, our possibly unrealistic moral rules or our pragmatic statistical inferences?

Since parents don't pretend to be infinitely good, but just more or less good, just as they at most claim finite knowledge, if they only do a very good job of managing their children's dental health because of less than perfect goodness and knowledge, that does nothing to impeach their human goodness and wisdom. But since God has to be infinitely good and infinitely wise or he doesn't exist as God, the world he provides for us cannot have even an infinitely small amount of excess evil in it beyond what is absolutely necessary for whatever moral purposes he may have or physical limitations he may have -- if we can admit that he can have any. G. W. Leibniz excused the evil in the world by saying that this was the best of all possible worlds God could create, implying that there is some metaphysical sense of com-possibility according to which it would be impossible, say, to have a world with enough water in it for humans to live without also constructing the world so that John F. Kennedy had to be assassinated. But since this type of constraint on the possible construction of the world is something we can at most assume but cannot possibly conceive or understand -- for why would Lee Harvey Oswald having bad aim on that day be inconsistent with the world having an adequate water supply? -- it really doesn't suffice as an explanation -- at least to our finite minds -- of why God has to allow evil if he wants to make any universe at all.

Wouldn't there be problems with a world state with respect to its redistributive effects? At present, the first world absorbs a vastly disproportionate amount of the world's resources, while people in the third world live on $2 a day. If this world government had a welfare system, obviously the democratic forces electing the rulers would not tolerate the current maldistribution of resources which is only made possible by dividing the world into separate nations so the global fairness of the wealth distribution is kept off the political agenda. With the single world state, however, you would have about five billion people voting to redistribute the wealth so as to even out resources around the world, with only about one billion people of the first world voting to preserve the current maldistribution of resources that allows us to have two cars and golfing vacations in Bermuda while most of the world lives in a grass hut with two goats as their sole source of 'weath.' If you average in our two cars and golfing vacations, multiplied times one billion votes, divided by the rest of the population's two goats and one grass hut, multiplied times five billion votes, the center of gravity of the electoral decision of how to distribute the single world state's resources is going to work out to one mud-brick hut, two goats, and a cow for each person. Would the one billion people who had lived in first-world nations tolerate that outcome?

Every country has a perfect right to enforce its immigration laws, and international law defines a country as the administration of a territory which has the capacity to control the entry and exit of people at its borders, so any country which foregoes the exercise of that right, as the U.S. has for years on its southern border, risks being denied the status of a nation under international law. However, that right should not be enforced in a racially selective way, since a fair administration of the law has to be race-neutral and treat all non-citizens without a legal visa right to remain as equal, whatever their ethnicity. Now the fact that the internal French memo indicated that Roma camps were being targeted might have been innocuous, since Roma camps may have been focused on just because they were known to be centers of the most illegal immigrants and so the best use of police resources was to concentrate on them. Or it could have been racist, which is what the European Commission seems to think. But can a race or ethnic group ever be assumed to be a threat to society because it has been objectively proved always to have been a group with a high percentage of criminals? Police now use non-racial profiling techniques to spot likely criminals, but is it just racist or can it be objectively justified to use racial membership as a profiling technique? The law enforces certain deliberately unrealistic ideals, such as the assumption that all people are equal, or that everyone is innocent until proven guilty, and the refusal of the law to recognize any possibility of a correlation between a race, an ethnicity, and criminality is just another one of those consciously unrealistic, idealistic and moral assumptions with which the law always operates. When I lived in Germany there were periodic Roma 'invasions,' and they would come into a fast food restaurant where the mother would distract you by hovering around you and asking for money, while one of her young children would put her hands all over your food. Since the child was dirty (perhaps this was part of the plan), you would not want the food any more, and so the mother and child would take your food for themselves. This happened so many times that I just had to give up eating out and instead stared eating in my student residence room. Finally the police started putting guards at the fast food restaurants and the Roma moved on. This type of behavior may just be the traditional cultural use of a travelling people who have never been able to earn their living from the land or from stable professions, and it is hard to break engrained cultural habits.

Why couldn't humans be every bit as free as they are today even though the only choices available to them in a world made by a truly loving God were good choices? You would be free to choose to listen to Beethoven or Mozart, to write a play or a sonnet, to paint a portrait or a landscape, but the physical world would be cleverly constructed so that you could not hurt anyone or do anything evil. Now you might say that this kind of limited world would not provide you with sufficient ambit to be really free, but the physical world's design already severely limits how evil we can be. If I wake up in a very bad temper I might seize a machine gun and start mowing down post office workers, but I cannot access an atomic bomb, and I can't extend the effects of my bad mood to people in China, or to people long since dead or not yet born. So since God has already designed a world in which our freedom to choose evil is limited by physical circumstances, why wouldn't he go all the way and limit it completely, which would still leave us free but also allow us never to merit his punishment? Or even if you were to argue that we would not be significantly free unless we could choose evil, then why would a loving God design a universe in which so many bad consequences would flow from our choice of evil? If the universe as now designed absolutely requires earthquakes, volcanoes, and hurricanes as the consequence of Adam and Eve having been disobedient on a given afternoon, it seems insufficiently perfect to be the product of an infinitely intelligent and infinitely good God, since those extremely distant consequences of original sin don't seem inevitably connected with it at all, so it must have been possible to make a world without that link.

Should we assume that Carthage became completely extinct ca. 200 B.C. by the Roman viciousness after the Battle of Zama? Since the Carthaginians were ultimately Punic migrants from the initial settlement in Lebanon, and the Lebanese settlement was never wiped out, at least one branch of Punic culture, of which Carthage was a part, survived. Also, Carthage had settlements on various islands in the Mediterranean, in Lybia, and Spain, so something of its culture must have survived there, becoming merged with later Roman and then Gothic overlays. One of the worst Holocausts or mass extinctions of history is now seldom mentioned, and that is the destruction of the various tribes blocking the advance of the Jewish people towards Judea at the time of Moses. The Old Testament describes in great detail how these various tribal nations were completely wiped out by the advancing Hebrews, but in contrast to the Nazi and Armenian Genocides, these mass exterminations don't seem to have made it to the list of genocides it is now illegal for anyone to deny. If they were put on that list, then liberal democratic states would wind up punishing people with the full force of the criminal law for denying stories in a religious text, which would seem to infringe that freedom of religion which is essential in a liberal society.

The idea that children should be denied the legal right to consent to sex before a certain age seems based on the notion that they have to be protected by the state against their own risk-benefit calculations. But interestingly, you can legally take a dangerous, potentially neck-breaking dive off a diving board into a swimming pool at a younger age than you can legally choose to do something perfectly natural and minimally dangerous like have sex. Most kids today know how to prevent pregnancy (or the fetus can be aborted easily enough), and AIDS education is ubiquitous, so both of these risks are now much smaller than the risks of taking a high dive into a pool. So we have to assume that the 'risk' young kids are being protected against by the law is the purely 'moral risk' that they will be sexual too early for social convention, though obviously not too early for their own biological drives. But is it legitimate for a free society to criminalize young people voluntarily acting out their sexual interests with consenting partners just because this is a moral affront but not as serious a health risk as a whole variety of other perfectly legal risks? Another problem with defining underage sex as statutory rape is that the minimum ages for consent to sex were set at historical periods when puberty occurred much later than today, largely because of dietary inadequacies. Also, the common social practise of society was to forbid sexuality outside of marriage quite strictly and to deny that choice to anyone under 18, but today most people accept that their teenage children will be sexual, yet the law has not caught up with this change in behavior. The final absurdity is that the legal age for marriage (with parental consent) in many jurisdictions is lower than the legal age for consent to sex, so society winds up defining unmarried but consensual sex as rape at age 13 but married consensual sex at age 13 as legal, which amounts to burdening teenagers with a rape conviction just because they weren't married, rather than because they forced someone into having sex against their will.