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Marat

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Everything posted by Marat

  1. My favorite proof of God's existence is the fact that in Hutchinson's Disease, a genetic condition which causes rapid aging and results in its sufferers dying of old age when they are in their twenties, the intellect of these patients also develops extremely quickly so they can savor the full horror of what is happening to them. If they had retained the limited intellect of children, then they would have missed out on much of the tragedy of their lives, but with better intelligence they can suffer more. Now how could such a perfectly designed horror have occurred just by biological coincidence? Obviously, there must be an Intelligent Designer behind all of this coming out so perfectly wrong. Similarly, 40% of those now on dialysis are diabetics, whose main disease symptom is extreme thirst from hyperglycemia, which is only imperfectly controllable because of the danger of hypoglycemia from over-control. But dialysis requires that patients severely restrict their fluid intake, so the match of sufferers to the suffering caused by the treatment they require is perfect, which again could hardly have happened just by biological coincidence rather than by the intelligent planning of a perfectly evil Mind. No doubt you too can think of similar examples of the perfect design of the world to be a hideous as possible. Just as seventeenth century theorists used to use theodicy/the cosmological argument to try to prove the existence of a good God by the goodness of the design of the world, we can use the evil of the world to prove the existence of an evil God. While the horrors of the world not caused by human action are logically inconsistent with the existence of a good God and destroy that hypothesis, the rare good things about the world do not similarly destroy the hypothesis of an evil God, since like any skilled torturer, He may well understand that to keep the feelings of his victims sensitive to the full horror of what is going wrong, He needs to reawaken and refresh their sensitivities now and then by letting a few good things happen now and then.
  2. The UN now estimates that about 10,000 kidneys are purchased a year on the current black market. As in any black market, the fact that governments make the trade illegal causes the trade to become dangerous, since criminals have to facilitate the exchanges. But if a government-regulated, legal market were introduced, such as they have in Iran, then such tragedies as arise from an illegal, unregulated market would not occur. Imagine living in a society where irrational religious beliefs, superstitions, and vague, undefined moral sentiments made dentistry seem unethical to most people. Governments would respond by making the practice of dentistry illegal, and then every so often the moral outrage of the public would be reassured by sensational media stories about people dying from back alley quack dentistry. Everyone with good teeth and healthy gums would self-righteously shake his head and express his disgust with that horrible trade, at least until he or someone in his family needed dentures.
  3. Marat

    Why The Anger?

    To relate what has been said in recent posts to the OP, perhaps what makes people angry at religious belief is that it represents a willlingness to impose solutions derived from tea leaf reading, which are then taken as absolutely, unshakeably valid no matter what their effects on real human need, on questions of public morality and value. If people seek to impose only positivistically derived values on public policy, then at least these proposals are based on values we can all measure and on reasoning we can all assess according to ordinary logic available to everyone. But if they seek to impose values dervied from mystical, inexplicable, superstitious sources on public policy, then instead of persuading me, offering me reasons which respect the type of intellect we both share, religious people simply try to force something down my throat which can be accepted only by arational faith.
  4. Since the 14th Amendment is arguably the most essential of all American liberties, and it does a lot of the legal work of sustaining the vital right to protection of a private sphere of autonomy for each individual against the community, I would hate to see any tampering with it just for its side-effects on the citizenship of children born to foreign nationals. If the 14the Amendment were altered in the current illiberal atmosphere, who knows what kind of Pandora's Box of libery-denying changes would be introduced. It is ironic that it is now the Right which is complaining about illegal immigration, since it was the Right which allowed 12,000,000 illegals to come into the country in the first place in order to provide labor unprotected by minimum wage laws for corporations to exploit. Perhaps with the economy now in a slump, xenophobia and racism now win out over the desire for cheap labor. That said, one of the criteria used in international law to define a country is that it must be an area which can maintain effective control over its borders and the definition of its population membership, but with America's southern border so porous, the U.S. has only tenuous status in international law as a country. This is a pitiful result for a country which spends more on its military budget to defend its national integrity than the rest of the world combined. The immigration issue raises fundamental questions about the nature of a liberal state. Is it just a kind of airport lounge which doesn't care about the cultural character of the people who live there, as long as they abide by the laws and constitution? Or can it legitimately insist on some cultural definition of its people? If there were enough space and enough jobs, would it be perfectly all right if 1.2 billion Chinese were to immigrate to the U.S. tomorrow, with the result that Christmas and Easter would no longer be legal holidays, Mandarin and Cantonese would be the national languages, and few if any 'Americans' would know who George Washington or Abraham Lincoln were? The Roman Empire didn't collapse because anyone declared war on it, but just because people of a different character moved across its borders in large numbers and gradually changed its nature. Is it just racism to insist on the preservation of a certain basic national cultural character in your own country?
  5. It would seem ironic to try to stand up for a country which values the separation of church and state and religious freedom by denying religious liberty in forbidding the building of a mosque near ground zero just because of its affiliation with a given religion. Zoning laws allow communities to regulate where certain structures can be built, but if you can demonstrate state-enforced religious prejudice behind these regulations, you can go to court and get them overturned. Just because all those who made their attacks on 9/11 were Moslems has never been taken to mean that the U.S. went to war with Islam in response to that aggression. We were never at war with Roman Catholicism just because all those who attacked the Alamo were Catholics!
  6. I agree. There are only about 400,000 people in the United States with endstage renal failure, and of these, many are so old or ill that they would not benefit from an organ transplant even if a replacement kidney were available. So the total number of kidneys needed would be only perhaps half that number, which would make a very small impact on the overall economy. Iran, which did introduce a kidney market a few years ago, has had no significant side-effects on its wider economy from that program, but it has cleared the list of patients waiting for a transplant. Using stem cells to recreate kidneys or some other novel method to generate a supply of natural, immunologically inactive replacement organs would solve the problem, but given that it would take medical scientists ten to twenty thousand years to invent a way to open doors if you gave them a schematic diagram and a working model of a doorknob to work from as a head start, I doubt that any such advance will appear in the next 50 years.
  7. But so many things would have to change in so many unpredictable or non-necessitated ways for the creation of a kidney market to wind up forcing people to sell a kidney that it would be difficult to draw any direct causal link between the creation of the market and the compulsion to sell a kidney. For example, until the mid-19th century selling life insurance was legally forbidden because such contracts were thought to be immoral for betting on someone's death, which was regarded as a sacred event determined by God. But once life insurance became legal, opening the market for bets on people's life expectancies did not force people to rely on life insurance pay-offs from their grandparents to pay for college tuition, though that was certainly possible.
  8. I agree entirely. Just because science has to begin with a very few unproved assumptions doesn't make it indistinguishable from belief systems which allow an undisciplined proliferation of ambitious and unnecessary assumptions. All scientific inference for example has to make the suppressed assumption that the future will be like the past, since otherwise the predictive power of its inferences loses its basis, but since the scope and number of assumptions is kept as small as possible, while the positivistic status of all assertions is strictly insisted upon, science remains clearly distinct from superstition, which freely allows itself any number of positivistically undisciplined explanatory entities and assumptions.
  9. I agree with you that anticipated improvements in medicine, the media reports of which have misled many people into thinking we are on the verge of great progress, will only materialize in the distant future, if ever. The whole field of organ transplantation is severely limited by two constraints: first, the percentage of humans dying in circumstances in which their organs can be harvested in time for their organs to be transplantable is extremely small, and second, the drugs which have to be used to suppress the immune system in order to make plansplants function are often more toxic than the diseases they are designed to treat. Trying to compensate for the first problem with animal transplants faces the problem of hyperacute rejection, since the tissues of animals are so foreign to the human immune system that no drug regimen can effectively suppress the rejection process. However, we already have one form of animal-to-human transplant available, which is the implantation of animal cells in humans after the cells have been immunologically isolated by being put in capsules which allow the desired hormones to escape from the cells but which keep out the immunologically active cells which could destroy them. This is now being done by the Living Cell Technolgies company, which is implanting porcine pancreatic islet cells encased in capsules into the abdomen of human diabetics to improve their blood sugar control without having to use immunosuppressive drugs.
  10. There are important differences in the notion of 'unfalsifiable' which bear on the issue of God's existence being incapable of proof or disproof. The theoretical work on the foundations of mathematics in the first third of the twentieth century demonstrated that any reasonably sophisticated mathematical system would contrain a number of statement which though true would necessarily not be provable within the system of rules describing that mathematics. The culmination of this is Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem (1931). But this kind of unfalsifiability does not make the assertion of these truths empty, because at least their truth insofar as we can trace them can be demonstrated. The only limit is that we cannot prove them true for all numbers (e.g., Fermat's Conjecture, Goldbach's Theorem, etc.) because the system of numbers is infinite. But with the God hypothesis things are different, since we have no empirical evidence justifying our seriously worrying about whether it is true or not in the first place, such as we do have for those 'unprovable' mathematical hypotheses. If we say we cannot prove either that Vishnu is a Lakers fan or not, we are not even making a coherent statement worth worrying about, since we have one thing entirely empty of empirical content, X = Vishnu, and we are trying to investigate what type of empirical criteria would have to be satisfied for attributing to it some actual empirically testable predicate, i.e., 'is a Lakers fan.' So the phrase, 'X is a Lakers fan,' is meaningful only if we have something with empirical definition on both sides of the equation so that we can seriously specify the criteria for attributing the predicate to the subject. Fretting about whether we can prove whether God exists or not is like worrying about whether the color blue is a Brazilian citizen.
  11. Marat

    Free Speech

    Although we want to allow as much free speech as possible, we have to begin by admitting that some free speech can be harmful, such as libel, giving false advice to someone who relies on you for professional guidance, directly counselling the commission of a crime, or inciting a riot. All organized societies make these types of free speech illegal because of their obvious harmfulness. But what about less clearly harmful speech, such as Holocaust denial, which is now illegal in several European countries, or pornography, which some feminist theoreticians now assert denies the free speech rights of women by 'silencing' them, or harms women by diminishing their stature in society? In all these cases the concrete harm following from such uses of free speech seems difficult to prove, so if we value free speech seriously, I think to avoid a slippery slope we have to allow unlimited free expression unless its harmfulness is emphatically clear.
  12. Consider an alternative perspective on this question: I assert that I am writing this comment by concentrating my thoughts into mystical forces which can move the keys on the keypad of my personal computer. If I refuse to give anyone a demonstration of this ability or to explain further how I just did it, there will never be any evidence to prove or disprove that that was indeed how I wrote this computer message. But would you then go around scratching your head and seriously wondering, "How can we now ever prove or disprove whether Marat really wrote that message by thought waves?" Would you for the rest of your life declare yourself a 'Marat typing comments by mystical thought-waves agnostic,' simply because you could not prove or disprove whether what I just claimed was true? The problem with the statement is that no conditions can be specified to test it, so in positivistic terms it is just a meaningless assertion which should not detain our inquiries nor induce us to carve out a space in our minds to be 'agnostic' about whether this ever happened or not. It is not a real problem, just a compilation of words which appear to state a real problem, as Wittgenstein might say. Can we ever prove or disprove that Zeus prefers eating cabbage to sipping soup? Is Hercules a Republican or a Democrat? Does Poseidon support the Israelis or the Palestinians? Does Apollo want Charlie Rangel to resign? Does God exist or not? All these questions suffer from the same defect of being essentially untestable while yet seeming to state real issues.
  13. Although the predominant hypothesis now offered to explain the vascular and neurological complications of diabetes is that these arise from excess blood sugar levels, this hypothesis cannot explain how the disease starts in the first place. An alternative hypothesis has attempted to explain both the cause and the later complications of diabetes from the cytokine inflammatory response to autoimmune disease, which damages not only the nerves and vascular beds, but also the pancreatic beta cells. Interestingly, this response has been found in both autoimmune diabetics (type 1) and in what have always been considered to be non-autoimmune diabetics, the type 2 patients, suggesting that autoimmunity-induced inflammation, rather than hyperglycemia, may be the cause both of the onset of the disease and the downstream complications of it. The plausibility of this hypothesis is reinforced by the disconnect which has been noted between blood glucose normalization efforts in diabetic patients and the vascular and neurological damage associated with this disease. If excess glucose caused the complications, glucose control should always clearly reduce them, but it does not. In contrast, if autoimmunity is the problem, glucose control will only accomplish part of the job, since excess glucose also generates some hyperoxidation on its own, but not enough to explain the whole clinical picture.
  14. A good way to sort out the differences between which female traits are caused by social conditioning and which are genetically caused is to look at women's behavior in different societies which have little or no connection with each other. The fact that women cry more readily in isolated Amazon Native tribes and also in New York City strongly suggests that this is genetic rather than cultural, unless by some astonishing coincidence Amazon Native and New York City culture both just happened to decide to condition female children to behave in the same way. The evolutionary reason for this may be that since women are physically weaker than men (average hemoglobin of 120 in women vs. 140 in men, ranging all the way up to 170 in some men; much lower muscle mass and higher fat percentage in women than in men), it makes more sense for women to warn the tribe of danger by screaming and crying easily so that the men can hear them at a distance and come running to apply their muscle to address the emergency. This is the same evolutionary reason why children scream and cry more easily than adults.
  15. The problem with diabetes is that it is a spectrum disorder so the required interventions vary as well. In the case of the patient described here, since he now only requires dietary interventions to manage his condition and actually has occasional blood sugar values below the diabetic and even below the normal range at 80, it is difficult to define the point at which his management of his condition is still within the range of what is objectively required and when it starts to become obsessive. If someone with hypertension checks his blood pressure three times a day to see how effective his anti-hypertensive medication is, that seems objectively required and is thus a psychologically healthy response. But what if he is mildly hypertensive and he checks his blood pressure ten times a day. At that point something starts to seem suspicious. The situation with diabetes is further complicated by the fact that many clinicians have different views about how intense the patient's management of the disease should be, so here again, differentiating what is a normal response to the objective requirements of the disease versus what is a neurotic over-reaction to a real condition can be subtle. Generally, the DSM-IV has always struck me as ridiculous in its excessive subdivision of categories and its elevation of phenomena from pop psychology to the level of 'real' diseases. If they keep this up, soon we shall have diagnostic entities like 'Global Warming Denialism Disorder' and 'Holocaust Scepticism Neurosis.' The fact that homosexuality used to appear among the roster of clinical entities until, for purely political reasons, a changing society required homosexuality to be re-defined as normal shows how silly the classification of diseases in the DSM has been. The interrator unreliability of schizophrenia as a diagnostic category makes the whole classification system suspect in my view. Sometimes I think that the last useful diagnostic innovation was Haslam's description of schizophrenia circa 1800.
  16. There are many possible versions of a regulated kidney market. In one, the government would pay for all kidneys acquired and then distribute them according to medical need to the people waiting for a transplant. Since Medicare now pays for dialysis for all people of whatever age who require it, and this costs $60,000 a year, the government would ultimately save money by getting people off dialysis by paying $240,000 for a kidney transplant operation for them. The government would then rationally have to spend about $15,000 to keep these patients going with anti-rejection drugs, but the longer the transplant lasted, the more the kidney purchase would work out to the benefit of the taxpayer. The purchase price of the kidney would also have to be factored in, but even if this were $75,000, a renal graft surviving 7 years would start to turn a profit for the taxpayer. Also, since most dialysis patients are too exhausted to work, while renal transplant patients have close to normal health, the return of transplanted patients to the workforce would have further benefits for the government tax revenue and for the economy generally. Even if patients were allowed to pay privately for a new kidney, the removal of rich patients from the transplant waiting list would increase the availability of transplants for the poorer patients, so the rich could not gain without automatically helping the poor. This does seem like a win-win situation, since the poor kidney vendor could escape poverty, the dying dialysis patient could return to health, the government could save money, and the economy could expand by the creation of a new and extremely valuable commodity in saleable kidneys. Yet interestingly, this idea is condemned by the United Nations, forbidden by the European Union, and rejected by the Istanbul Declaration signed in 2009 by 180 countries. The arguments opposed to a kidney market are usually emotive and romantic, waxing poetic about the sacredness of the body, the duty of the West not to exploit the poor in the Third World by buying their kidneys, the racism of rich Caucasions buying kidneys from poor Blacks, etc. But given that the world-wide ban on the black market kidney trade will kill 10,000 dying dialysis patients a year who will now have no way to get a replacement kidney in time, these romantic arguments ring hollow against this mass murder.
  17. Marat

    Why The Anger?

    Severian, I believe the analogy between Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse meeting in secret and God existing in the infinite beyond is perfect, since in both cases we come to the assertion equipped with a lot of knowledge about the phantasmogoric character of the entities asserted to exist. We know that intelligent, talking rabbits and mice would have to be beings with miraculous powers, just as we know that a mind-reading, universe-creating, infinite, eternal Nobodaddy in the sky would be an entity with miraculous powers. Given their miraculous nature, we would not for a second entertain sufficient serious doubt regarding any assertion about them -- whether it be that they met in a hotel in New Jersey or that they gave their only begotten son to save the world from damnation -- without equally stunning evidence that there was a good reason to carve out a logical space in our intellect for serious doubt about their reality. But in the absence of some stunning evidence to induce us seriously to begin wondering about their reality, to set us on the path of bothering to think of ourselves as agnostics about their existence, we just dismiss them and move on. I can think of no decisive experiment which could conclusively prove or disprove that the Tooth Fairy or the Sandman exist, since they seem only to come at night when everyone is asleep, and if the observer is not asleep, they stay away, so no observer could in principle ever see them. But even though we now have to admit that the Tooth Fairy and the Sandman, defined as beings with miraculous powers who stay away from awake observers, are beyond human knowledge and cannot be proved or disproved to exist by our puny brains, we still never hear people professing themselves to be Tooth Fairy agnostics or unwilling to say that the Sandman doesn't exist. This is because they are miraculous entities, and no one is agnostic over anything miraculous unless there is very good evidence that we should entertain serious doubt about its existence, which is lacking in the case of these two nocturnal visitors. The only reason people are agnostics about the equally miraculous and untestable God is that the long history of cultural belief in a deity seems falsely to suggest that there is some substantial evidence for his existence, making serious doubt sensible, though there is not.
  18. People suffer terribly while waiting on dialysis for a kidney transplant, and thousands die waiting. Because only a tiny percentage of people die in circumstances which allow a kidney to be used for transplant, cadaver-source kidneys can never meet the demand for replacement organs. A healthy person can donate one kidney with no damage to health or reduction of life expectancy, but few people are generous enough to donate a kidney for free. To reduce the terrible human suffering and high death rate in the dialysis population, some have proposed that we permit a government regulated kidney market to operate, in which healthy donors would be allowed to give one kidney for a set price to someone with no kidneys. However, such a market would now be illegal in almost the entire world, and last year most of the world's countries got together to pass the Istanbul Declaration which committed them all to introduce even harsher statutes to prohibit such a market from ever being established. U.S. federal law now punishes kidney patients trying to save their life by buying a kidney with a five-year prison sentence. A major argument against such a market is that it would exploit poor people by inducing them to sell a kidney for money, but in a bargain which would logically have to be to their disadvantage, even though they voluntarily elected to make it and it would have no significant negative effects on their health. It seems to me that rather than exploiting poor people, such a market would provide an empowering option to poor people to escape their poverty by a new means which is now inaccessible to them.
  19. Marat

    Why The Anger?

    YdoaPs says that he can lack a belief in deities, but still also believe it is impossible to know whether they exist or not, so that he can be an agnostic atheist. But I think that it is logically impossible to maintain this position, for reasons Norwood Hanson outlined in his 1967 article, 'Why I am Not an Agnostic.' Consider this analogy: I lack a belief in the fact that Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse secretly met in a New Jersey hotel many decades ago to plan the overthrow of the U.S. government and thoroughly destroyed all evidence that they ever met. I also recognize that it is now impossible to prove that they either met or did not meet, since, by the hypothesis of this analogy, the event occurred many years ago and all evidence of it was destroyed. So far the analogy with YdoaPs version of the grounds for being an agnostic atheist are perfect. But the analogy breaks down once we realize that we would never go around after being confronted with the story about Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse and declare ourselves to be agnostics about whether Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse ever met to conspire about the overthrow of the U.S. government. Instead, because that hypothesis is so outlandish that it would require extraordinarily good evidence for us to entertain any serious doubts about its truth, we simply dismiss it as not worth our attention or our active doubting. So for the same reason it is utterly impossible for any rational person seriously to be an agnostic about the meeting between Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse, it is also utterly impossible to say that you are an agnostic atheist. No rational person goes around holding open a space for serious doubt in his mind about whether the Easter Bunny, Mickey Mouse, the Tooth Fairy, or God exists, so no one can be an agnostic about these things, in the same way that it is reasonable to be an agnostic about whether there are intelligent beings on other planets.
  20. Marat

    Why The Anger?

    The angry denunciations of theism seem to arise from the profound disgust most atheists feel with the problem of having to live in the same society with adults who refuse to grow up and who still hide in a child's fairy tale. By refusing to confront the most fundamental and challenging issues of meaning in human life -- what does my finite existence mean, how do I spend my limited time most meaningfully, how do I develop a meaningful ethics for myself, where do I find the courage to face a certain death which means my certain extinction -- religious people impoverish the intellectual level of society for everyone. This can be quite frustrating for people who have gotten beyond relying on some image or fantasy to provide a pseudo-answer to all these problems in the form of some mythological tale rather than dealing with them by rational reflection. For the atheist living in a predominantly religious society it is like being an adult in a world of kindergarteners: you feel deprived of intellectually valuable company in a culture which refuses to think seriously about the most serious existential issues, and which instead just pastes a gigantic 'happy face' over those questions in the form of a story made up by a tribe of Bronze Age nomads about invisible, mind-reading, world-creating, morality-enforcing, magical beings in the sky ensuring that everything comes out all right in the end. Even worse, the presence of a majority of religious believers in society also harms atheists by imposing on them laws democratically generated by religious notions which atheists reject. Restrictions on abortion, the illegality of the right to die and assisted suicide, the supposed sacredness of corpses which restricts the number of life-saving organs for transplant, tax exemptions for churches increasing the tax rates for private residences, etc., all force atheists to suffer for beliefs they do not share. Atheists are also militant because they are correctly unwilling to let people assume the middle ground of agnosticism, which makes no sense at all. I am only agnostic about matters which I know could reasonably be true on the basis of logic or experience, but not about phantasmogoric tales of preposterous proportions. I freely admit that I am not sure at the moment whether it is raining in India, since I don't live anywhere near there and I haven't checked the world weather reports today, but I do not seriously entertain any doubt that Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny are now conspiring in a dingy hotel room in New Jersey to take over the United States government in a military coup. Before I could be agnostic about that, I would need some good reasons to open a space in my mind for seriously wondering whether it could be true or not, and of course no one has ever provided any. The same is true of the God hypothesis.
  21. A lot depends on how we measure harm. For example, on Hobbes' view it is certainly less harmful for an individual to live in a society where he is taxed to pay for public services and security than to live in a state of nature where he would not be taxed but where he and his fortune would be exposed to the insecurities of the natural world with no laws, no police, and no courts to protect order. But if we measure harm less globally then we would have to say that the taxes are immediately harmful to the person who loses money, just as the speed limits are harmful to someone who wants to drive somewhere quickly and without interference, at least until we raise our sights and look at the entire traffic system and see how harmfully risky driving on a road with no speed limits would be. We are left without many rules to guide the use of Mill's principle beyond an earnest desire not to make more rules than are really beneficial to people's 'real needs' as opposed to legally enforcing the interests of people to manage other people's lives by imposing their own value systems them. Is there a rule or concept that rigorously shows why it is impermissible to insist that everyone go to church every Sunday because that will make them more moral on someone's theory and thus generate a less harmful society for everyone, but why it is permissible to insist that everyone obey the speed limits while driving, even if they are painfully inconvenient and thus harmful on some occasions? If it is all just a matter of degree or covert cultural values then Mill's harm principle can't provide much guidance.
  22. I think the answer to all the interesting problems you propose is that the only way to preserve the liberalism implicit in Mill's harm principle is to insist on very clear proofs of immediately harmful effects as the only criteria which can count for limiting human freedom. Since everything ultimately leads to everything else in a densely interconnected world, everything can be imagined to be harmful or beneficial, depending on which consequences and interactions we empathize. Every choice everyone else adopts has some effect on my quality of life. If large numbers of people choose to be strict Roman Catholics, women may lose their abortion rights as a result of laws being changed or courts coming to be populated by judges with very different views from those of the Roe v. Wade court. If large numbers of people exercise their right to leave school in the 8th grade, there may be a doctor shortage which negatively impacts the physically disabled. We could try to say that we will allow people to inflict minor harms on others if the freedoms people gain by inflicting those harms mean more to them than the harms mean to those hurt, but then we would have some difficulty in calibrating whose harm outweighed whose freedom in a value-neutral way. Heinrich von Kleist, the German dramatist, used to say that the noise of church bells irritated him profoundly, but because the general value system of society favors religion, we don't regard bell ringing on a Sunday morning as a nuisance. But an explicit billboard ad for a pornographic film which we could more easily ignore than the noise of ringing churchbells would be regared as so harmful that it had to be forbidden. In a democracy, where we trust people so much that we grant them the right to rule the country by their free choices, we should lean toward trusting them with the freedom to make their own errors and bear the consequences. But should that mean that people can drive motorcycles without a helmet in a country with a free public healthcare system? Perhaps the most we can do with Mill's principle is take it as a general orientation towards our decisions about what to allow and what to forbid, with considerable limitations on the margins.
  23. John Stuart Mill, one of the 19th century founders of modern liberalism, stated that no country respectful of human liberty should make anything illegal unless it was clearly objectively harmful to someone. While this seems to be a sensible criterion for determing what should justly be made illegal in contrast from what the state should leave people free to do, it would have some startling consequences. For example, would incest between consenting adults qualify as harmful or would it have to be made legal? What about necrophilia of corpses with no living relatives? What about sex between humans and animals? Should a society assume the right to make things illegal simply because they are distasteful or they are profoundly disturbing to ordinary moral intuitions, even if no one is actually physically harmed by allowing them? If we do accept that premise, then where do we draw the line? That would seem to allow a profoundly Christian state to force everyone to go to church on Sundays or pay a fine or go to prison.
  24. What a profoundly odd society America is! While it is perfectly legal for parents to beat their children, even though there is an enormous amount of evidence that child beating is psychologically and physically extremely harmful, it is still worth passing special legislation to forbid anyone slipping children some small amounts of something baked into brownies which may make them silly for half an hour. John Stuart Mill set forth an excellent principle of legislation when he said that no country should ever make anything illegal unless it was clear that what was made illegal was truly objectively harmful. I guess he should have added to that the proviso that it should also be significantly harmful, and that nothing should be criminalized if it is less harmful than other, more harmful things which are still legal.
  25. Lawyers always have two dimensions: what they believe in their role as 'hired guns' working for clients, and what they believe when they are free to state their own views on the bench. Keeping that in mind with Ms. Kagan, it is important not to confuse the advice she gave to government clients with what she may really believe on her own. Being a good supreme court justice is essentially about being a talented interpreter of the law, so there is no reason why experience as a litigator or judge is necessarily any more important than being a good academic. That said, Kagan's academic qualifications are dreadful, since she doesn't have enough publications to get a part-time teaching position at a third-rate law school. The fact that she is dean of Harvard Law School says more about how far affirmative action has gone these days than about her genuine qualifications. She does have the unique qualification of being the only Supreme Court appointee to look exactly like Lou Costello. Supreme court appointees often become quite unpredictable once they gain a seat on the bench, so it is difficult to judge whether Kagan will be more left-wing or right-wing. The Federal Court judge who just ruled against the gay marriage ban in California was appointed to be right-wing, so it is clear that judicial philosophy is always an open question.
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