Let me begin thus: even after all this time — and even after all the damage that has been done to the country by the left and the various and variegated intrusions and infiltrations of its ideology throughout our culture, our language, and our very espistemology — there are those on the right who are still so committed to covering for their mistakes about Obama (a “good man” who loves the country, a garden-variety liberal Democrat to be juxtaposed against the vicious hard-right visigoths), about the way forward for the GOP (don’t be “unhelpful!” Watch what you say: it’s the only way to constrain the speech police!), and in maintaining their own power, prestige, and sophistic faux-intellectual advantages, that they would actively undermine what has been a growing epiphany for many of us who are daily under siege by the left’s rules of etiquette and engagement: that the way we interpret — and the way interpretation actually works — not only matters, but is in fact crucial to understand as a tool for defeating the now accelerated encroachments on our liberty of expression. It is no accident that as we continue to allow an incoherent view of language insinuate itself deeper into our epistemological foundation, we are more and more beholden to the whims of those presuming to police our thought and speech.
For years I have made this case — and for years all of the resistance has come from two sources: those on the left, who favor the very kind of post-structuralism and anti-foundationalism that allows them to avoid any guilt pangs over logical inconsistency and who enjoy the power that is galvanized by a mob usurpation of meaning; and those on the right who benefit from the very same dynamic, largely because they find it crucial for their professional and pedantic careers to lay claim to the meaning of others so that they can rework those meanings to fit their own personal desires. The former, naturally, is to be expected: the leftist worldview of identity politics, anti-foundationalism, Gramsciism, the “diversity” project, hate speech law, manipulating narrative, manufactured consent — all of these things rely on what is insidiously referred to in the most American of ways: “the democratization” of interpretation and meaning. The latter, however, is both unfortunate and deeply disturbing: this same democratization of meaning, and the same constraints to expression that are impelled by the left, are supported and aided by some on the right, mostly lawyers as it turns out, who themselves rely on being able to usurp individual meaning and proclaim it in “democratic” terms, the formula for which I’ll again explain.
Over the weekend, and presumably launched on the occasion of John Roberts’ Burwell opinion, a center-right California Lawyer who once boasted in private emails that he would “drive [me] off the internet,” pulled from his archives a post he called “prescient” — one that was wrong and disingenuous back in 2010 when it first appeared; one that is equally wrong and disingenuous today. The post, and the new post touting it, both of which argue that intentionalism has no place in legal hermeneutics, very purposely ignore points about intentionalism that had been explained to its author over and over again. Too, it uses the instance of John Roberts’ very clearly faulty (and mistaken) appeal to intent to try to marginalize the only coherent linguistic model for interpretation that exists — and the very one that insists upon process, that how you get there matters, in its admonitions about proper interpretative mechanics.
The author of the post is a self-styled textualist, which in terms familiar to those who’ve studied the history of interpretation theory places him in the realm of reader-response proponents, the Barthean French post structuralists, or the New Critics, all of whom revolted against the authoritarian author and his presumptive control over the meaning of his own text. The argument went something like this: the author’s meaning matters only inasmuch as we allow it to matter. What matters more is what the “text itself says” — that is, what a speech act newly untethered from its origin can “say” to us. In the legal realm, constraints are put on such a formulation that are not put on to the same formulation in the literary realm: in the case of legal hermeneutics, the Ideal Reader posited is a set of “reasonable people who engage the text fairly”; in other arenas, as with the interpretation of art or literature, all sort of other textualist impulses are foregrounded: one may read what a text (and it’s important here to distinguish between a text that exists by itself as text alone, with an authorship that is of necessity bracketed or ignored, as per textualism, and one that we presuppose was intended by some agency wishing us to receive its message, as per intentionalism) “says” through any number of discipline specific lenses: post-colonialism; critical race studies; psychiatric/psychological phenomenology; feminism; queer theory; and so on. In each of these cases, the Ideal Reader uses his own discipline — be it law or gender feminism — to focus on the messages implicit in the text qua text, that is, that exist in the text as it is divorced from intent. It is important to note: there is no structural difference whatsoever between a gender-fem “reading” of a text (the kind that finds all sort of latent sexism in various canonical works, then drives them out of the canon) and the kind of legal hermeneutics that calls itself “textualism”. In both cases, the text is said to mean and say — to “speak” — without any indexicality to its author(s) (or in the case of law, authors and ratifiers).
But in truth, the very notion that a text can speak apart from the signification of that text by some agency — some human with some intent that he attaches to a set of arbitrary marks or sounds — is an absurdity: A text is no more alive and capable of speech than a lump of coal, and documents are no more alive than the paper or pixels they’re written on. The fact that in legal hermeneutics, interpreters who consider themselves “textualists” are more rigorous and constrained in the latitude they give themselves (and on occasion, they give up this pretense altogether) to ascribe their own meaning to those marks in their decoding doesn’t make their textualism any more coherent than the textualism that allows queer theorists to see a homoerotic relationship between Huck and Jim, or between Curious George and the Man in the Big Yellow Hat. All it does do is better approximate the intentionalism that is at the heart of ALL TEXTUALISM, and in so doing often reaches the very same conclusions.
Still, how you get there matters: And a textualist is nothing but an intentionalist who has chosen to privilege his intent over the intent of the agency responsible for producing the speech act.
Since it’s all the rage these days, allow me to quote from my rather prescient post, also back in 2010, in which I argue that Justice Scalia, though he calls himself a “textualist,” is actually an intentionalist, intentionalism being the default for interpretation. It just is — and any second-order description of what it is one thinks one is doing when one interprets is mere embroidery and, at its worst, dangerous delusion:
not only is it possible for marks that aren’t words to look just like words (egret scratchings in the sand, the output of millions of monkeys on millions of typewriters producing, by random selection, “pass the salt,” etc.), but in fact it is this very possibility that creates the distinction between what we consider words and what we consider accidental (because unintended) facsimiles of words.
A simple way to illustrate this: Were we to purchase several editions of, say, a Shakespeare play, would we argue that because the play is printed in different typefaces and different sized fonts in the various editions that the meaning of Shakespeare’s text has been altered in each case? Of course not. And that’s because we recognize that a cosmetic change to the signifiers — so long as we can still make out the marks clearly — doesn’t fundamentally change the relationship between the signifier and the signified we presume to be operative. Or, put more simply, we believe that the signs are still the same in each edition — that what Shakespeare meant to signify doesn’t change from reproduction to reproduction. And it is signs we care about when engaging a text–at least in those instances wherein we’re claiming to do with the text is interpret it.
For Scalia, “words” are signs. After all, he wouldn’t argue that the text of a statute printed on a computer screen says something different than the text of a statute that appears on paper merely because the fonts have changed. And so when he maintains that he “doesn’t care” about intent, he is mistaken: he has already assumed intent, because otherwise, he couldn’t see signs as signs, or (to borrow his terminology) words as words. So he is an intentionalist, as are we all. Looked at from the perspective of language, then, Scalia’s argument is essentially this: “I don’t care about words; I care about words.” Which, good for him.
From there, it is simple to track the errors in his description of what he thinks he’s doing as opposed to what he’s actually doing. First, when Scalia says, “I take the words as they were promulgated to the people of the United States, and what is the fairly understood meaning of those words,” what he is saying is “I take the intended signs as they were promulgated to the people of the United States, and what is the fairly understood meaning of those intended signs.” Second, what Scalia means by “fairly understood” is that he will assume, as part of legal convention (and so itself a convention of a convention), that the legislators whose job it is to write the laws have written those laws in such a way that their intent will be clear.
What follows, then, is Scalia interpreting the intended text of the law with the presupposition in mind that the writers were hoping to clearly signal their intent. And so his interpretation factors in that implied promise on the part of the intending legislators as a legal convention.
What Scalia hasn’t done is dismissed the writers’ intent; he has instead accepted that intent as foundational to his interpretation and then applied the terms of a contract agreed upon by the legislators and the judicial branch, namely, that the legislators will craft their texts in the most conventional way possible; and the judge will interpret that text under the assumption that the legislators have signified conventionally. Without that intent assumed, it makes no sense for Scalia to lay claim to “interpreting” to begin with.
Problems only arise when “textualists” describe what they are doing incorrectly, and then try to turn that erroneous description into an official methodology: Scalia’s assertion that “intent doesn’t matter” is demonstrably false: the fact that he depends upon intent is evident the moment he decides to treat words as words, the moment he treats each reproduction of a statute as the same statute (even if the typeface has changed). And so his follow on statement — that he is interested in the “fairly understood meaning of those words” — is merely a preemptive warning to writers that when he interprets (in the specific context of legal hermeneutics), he expects that what he is interpreting will have been signified in such a way that he can usefully reconstruct its intent using the conventions specific to the text’s moment of production.
He is still appealing to (what he believes to be the original) intent. That he has decided to take on faith that the intent was signaled conventionally is not a sign that he “doesn’t care” about original intent; instead, it is a sign that he relies upon it for interpreting “fairly” to begin with.
What Scalia wants to guard against — because he, too, has misunderstood intentionalism — is the potential controlling interest of “some secret meaning” in a text. But a “secret meaning” not signaled most likely won’t get decoded anyway; and a secret meaning that is known to the “interpreter” doesn’t need to be “interpreted” in the first place. Or, to put it another way, you mean what you mean. But just because you mean is no guarantee others will correctly decode your meaning.
[…]
[…] the meaning of a text hasn’t changed simply because it doesn’t adhere to convention. The adjudicator has simply ruled, for purposes of enforcement, that the third party could not possibly discern the intent from the marks provided.
As I keep arguing — and, in fact, it has been my entire basis for explaining intentionalism — it matters how you get there.
Textualists who adhere to a conception of interpretation that “democratizes” a text by intending to hand it over to the public (and that’s what convention is, a public expression of the breadth of prior meanings a given “culture” has come to recognize) — even if only while doing legal interpretation — lend credence to a linguistically incoherent (and yet increasingly institutionalized) view of language that, because it claims to be interpreting without appealing to intent (even if in practice it merely hides its usurpation of that intent), promotes an idea of language wherein the interpretive community not only determines meaning, but it does so while claiming it is interpreting the author’s meaning — having first dismissed his intent as irrelevant.
This is lazy thinking. And it is lazy thinking made worse by a cynical refusal to surrender the power over the meaning its advocates desire.
We’ve seen the practical effects of such a mindset — in the (often disingenuous) outrage aimed at Bill Bennett or Tony Snow or Rush Limbaugh or guys with male dogs who walk too close to some suspicious old Negro gentleman and say the “wrong” thing.
To say […] “I know what you meant, but what you meant is signaled in such a way that it couldn’t possibly be interpreted as consonant with your intent unless [the receiver of the message] also knew beforehand what you meant […] is different from saying “I know what you meant, but what you meant doesn’t matter, because convention says you meant something else, and your intentions are irrelevant when it comes to determining what you meant.”
In fact, in the first instance, you are holding the original intending agency responsible for failing to signal his intent — while allowing that he means what he means; in the second instance — the one supported by the theory of textualism (if not always in practice) — you are telling the original agency that what he meant or didn’t mean is not important, because consensus (as determined by convention) will tell you what you meant.
At which point all you’ve done is strip the original text of its meaning, turned it into a set of signifiers, and then, by your own act of intending, attached to that set of signifiers the signifieds you prefer, taken from the realm of “convention.”
Or, to put it another way, you have ascribed your own will to the marks in order to make them mean — and you have done so at the expense of the signs you were originally asked to interpret. The result being that you haven’t “interpreted” at all. You’ve merely rewritten — and so created an entirely new text.
And ruling in favor of the text you created is hardly the kind of dispassionate functionality one expects from a judge.
The short term effect of institutionalizing such an interpretive paradigm is to silence those who fear that a given interpretive community will likely rob them of their meaning; the long term effects are to give meaning to whatever group shouts its claim the loudest — and to turn truth into a battle of group wills: might makes right, and the ends justify the means.
This is the left’s goal. Yet some on the right continue to give them the cover they need to lay the road that will lead directly to that end.
Scalia is an intentionalist. His insistence that he is not — and his explanation for how he isn’t — promotes an incoherent idea of language that those looking to undermine the idea of individual autonomy readily embrace. A shame, because his method for interpreting doesn’t match his explanation of what he’s doing when he interprets.
I think it very straightforward here that intentionalism does not, in the realm of legal convention, commit anyone to look for “secret meanings” — and in fact, it very pointedly disallows such meanings as being operative in law, because to know a meaning that isn’t signaled would mean there’s nothing to “interpret” to begin with. More, because legal convention requires that a future reading be understood by those without recourse to some claim to special knowledge contained only in the heads of legislators, the intentionalist would note that justices are compelled to send unclear texts back to their authors and ratifiers to fix them so that the intent claimed therein is made manifest to “reasonable people” reading “fairly.”
But what they are reading isn’t a text that speaks for itself: it’s a text that speaks for legislative enactment, and so speaks for those who wrote it and (corporately) passed it. It is not a living thing: it is the second-order proclamation of legislative intent rendered in code whose kernel expressive units — signifiers, or marks, or sound forms — are by their very nature arbitrary, becoming complete only once signification is added. For instance, “cat” doesn’t come to mean a furry house pet until we add to the signifier c-a-t the signified to which it refers. That is, “cat” can also refer to a hep jazz musician, eg. Which doesn’t, as a textualist or post-structuralist would claim, mean the the signifier “cat” means both of those things at once; rather, that which of those specific things it means, that as each is used separately over time can then be added to conventional usage, is determined by signification, by some agency intending “cat” to mean a furry house pet, or a jazz musician, or in some instances of intent, both simultaneously.
This is absolutely crucial to any understanding of how language functions. Because the battle between textualism and intentionalism (which battle isn’t even a battle between two schools: textualism IS intentionalism) comes down to one central conflict: whose intentions should we privilege when what we claim to be doing is interpreting? By claiming that you are bracketing authorial intent and just reading what an inanimate and insentient object like a text “has to say,” what you are doing is allowing that what you believe it says is the operable locus of meaning — and the author’s intent in producing the speech act is either to be ignored or, at best (in originalism), used as a presumptive guide. That is, you are granting yourself license to take signs supplied by some other agency, empty them of their indexical referents, their singnifieds, and apply your own indexical referents to the marks. In some instances, this maneuver is given legitimacy by the assertion that we care only what the text says, regardless of what the writers/utterers meant (Scalia, et al); in other instances, this maneuver is said to condemn or praise an author for imbuing the text with meanings that were never intended — the gambit being to then attribute to the author “meaning” in a text that is wholly the invention of the person engaging the text. In this way, textualism allows for motivated “interpretive communities” to decide and declare that a text means more or other than what its author intended, and that that more or other is oftentimes grounds for an Inquisition into the author or utterer’s purity.
To see this in action, the SCOTUS case we should be looking at is the housing case in which Justice Kennedy ruled that disparate impact is the result of “unconscious discrimination” — that is, that discrimination, even discrimination not intended, is nevertheless real and so can be remedied by the state. What Kennedy did is look at raw data, imbue it with meaning apart from the random dispersion of statistical nodes, and apply to it an interpretation that essentially wrote math into a narrative of secret and invidious injustice, regardless of whether or not that injustice was intentional. That is, he added his own signification to the signifiers on offer in order to rewrite the text.
John Roberts, of course, did the same thing, regardless of his claim that he was trying to adhere to the intent of the legislature. An intentionalist, it should now be abundantly clear, would say that even if one believed that the intent of the legislature was to create workable insurance markets (and given what we’ve heard from Jonathan Gruber, or what Obama and other proponents of the ACA have said about the ultimate goal being a single payer system), the legislature, by failing not only to include “federal exchanges” in their text but by very pointedly relying on the specific “state exchanges,” in no way signaled the intent they claimed, and therefore need to rewrite the law to make that intent clear.
Roberts didn’t do that. Instead, he “saved” the law by rewriting it, by adding his own intentions to save the law to the signifiers “exchanges of the state” so that they now included the signified “and of the federal government.” There is nothing in that misuse of the interpretive process that an intentionalist would ever justify, support, applaud, or allow.
And sadly, the lawyer, Patrick Frey — who was linked by Ed Driscoll filling in on Instapundit over the weekend (Ed didn’t respond to my various calls to rebut the sloppy dissembling he’d offered up by way of quotation) — knows all this. And we know he knows all this because he links to the very post that disavows what he claims are concerns that trouble intentionalism and that pointedly explains how they aren’t problematic in the least. Yet he is so invested in proclaiming his putative stance victorious that he would purposely and very selfishly do harm to the conservative movement, which can only extricate itself from the left’s control over language and narrative by understanding precisely how that control is operative and has become institutionalized. How else to explain how he can read
What Scalia wants to guard against — because he, too, has misunderstood intentionalism — is the potential controlling interest of “some secret meaning” in a text. But a “secret meaning” not signaled most likely won’t get decoded anyway; and a secret meaning that is known to the “interpreter” doesn’t need to be “interpreted” in the first place. Or, to put it another way, you mean what you mean. But just because you mean is no guarantee others will correctly decode your meaning
[emphasis added] …and then 5 years later write, as if in response to intentionalism in general and my explanations of how it works specifically:
“it is not fair to require the citizenry to obey secret, unexpressed intentions that they were never told about”
Um, of course it isn’t. Which is why nobody is claiming that it is. And as was very clearly noted, nothing in intentionalism requires it. Frey’s is a strawman argument meant to dupe those who don’t have the patience to work through the actual arguments on offer. Or if you wish to be less kind, it’s a falsehood being used to try to undermine the actual argument being made for purposes of … undermining the actual argument being made.
In fact, the intimation in the lawyer’s argument acts in a way that takes what I’ve actually argued and claims I’ve argued the precise opposite, in a kind of perversely ironic performative of exactly why all this matters. It is, as a post, proof of the necessity of rigor and appealing to the intent of the author, not to a free-floating “text” that can be made to mean something other by textualists who will routinely remove it from one context and place it in a new context in order to pretend to re-animate it.
Look: Patiently and very rigorously explaining how this works — knowing that people’s eyes tend to glaze over when you start writing about signifiers or hermeneutics — has not always been easy or gratifying. And yet I’ve done so for nearly fifteen years on protein wisdom because it is essential to our understanding of how we’ve been bested in the propaganda battles and culture wars — not on the merits but rather through the very kernel assumptions about language we’ve allowed to become settled truths.
They aren’t. The “democratization” of meaning is nothing more than call for mob rule — for manufactured consent and a will to power — over individualism. It is a way to silence the individual agency by usurping or coopting his meaning. That it is still being jealously guarded as a right by putative conservatives who have been wrong every step of the way about how best to beat the left at its game is not so much surreal as it is revolting.
In “King v. Burwell: Intentionalism Trumps Textualism, and the Rule of Law Dies,” California DDA Patrick Frey writes:
I noted that if one were foolish enough to apply an “intentionalist” reading of laws, rather than a “textualist” reading, one could simply have judges write protections for children into the law, in accordance with legislative intent. After all, who really thinks Congress wanted to leave children suffering from pre-existing conditions at the mercy of the insurance companies? But this takes the rule of law and throws it right out the window — because it is not fair to require the citizenry to obey secret, unexpressed intentions that they were never told about. Thus, only the text, and the text alone, is the law. That is the only way the rule of law works. As I said in 2010: “How can it be workable to make citizens hostage to legislative intent that cannot be divined from the text of the law by a reasonable audience?”
That hypothetical, decried by some as unrealistic, turned out to be a pretty close parallel to the King v. Burwell case.
It is clear here that, even though Frey knows that intentionalism in no way allow judges to “write protections for children into the law” if that intent wasn’t expressed — at best, they’d return the text of the law to the legislature and tell it that if that is in fact what they intended, they’d have to make that intent manifest — he nevertheless wishes to push, yet again, the very kind of “textualism” (itself intentionalism, with the audience now assuming control over whose intentions come to matter for purposes of interpretation) that is used by the gender feminists, the queer theorists, the post-colonialists, and so on, to find in texts all sort of things that aren’t explicitly signaled. It’s a very slippery justification for allowing oneself to play games with the signs of others while pretending to be acting on behalf of a speaking text, one that is communicating without recourse to authorship.
But of course, the only way a text can communicate is for us to agree that we are engaging something that is language in the first place, and what makes something that looks like language language is our intent to see it as such. We don’t “interpret” Boggle boards because we don’t believe them to be speaking to us, no matter how “reasonable” and “fair” we are with our readings of the “plain language” of a set of randomly distributed letters on a shakeable game board. We do, however, treat texts written by legislators as language because we (rightly) presume that it was written and ratified by some agency capable of having signified. And so intentionalism is our default position.
Frey continues:
I know some readers are convinced that Congress intended to include the words “established by the state” as an expression of federalism. The idea here is that the states were encouraged to establish their own exchanges by a carrot/stick approach. The argument goes that Congress was telling state officials: establish an exchange, and you get the subsidies (the carrot). Refuse to establish an exchange, and your citizenry gets nothing — and you face the wrath of the voters (the stick).
There is much disagreement about this on both sides. The conservatives point to Jonathan Gruber, a central ObamaCare drafter. The lefties note that Gruber was elected by nobody, and they point to a complete absence of any reliable evidence by an actual legislator saying that they wanted to use subsidies to coerce the states. (The famous Baucus statement is pretty ambiguous, even according to Michael Cannon, not to mention the fact that Baucus admitted he didn’t even read the bill.) Frankly, I don’t think the winning position in this murky debate is very clear. Whatever the origin of the “established by the state” language, I think the best explanation of its retention in the final bill is that the legislators foolishly assumed every state would set up an exchange. They guessed . . . poorly.
Again, there is nothing herein that troubles intentionalism in the slightest. In fact, I agree with just about every word of it, save for the ambiguity of what the left’s ultimate intent was and has been, which as an intentionalist I would argue is clear in the plain language of “exchange of the state” and bolstered by both the repetition and its offset by other uses of “federal.”
And yet, Frey treats our agreement as disagreement, for reasons I suppose only he can answer:
My own personal opinion is that allowing one’s self to be dragged into the muck of a messy debate about intent misses the point. My view is that arguing about legislative intent is a fool’s errand, because as I said way back in 2010, there really is no such thing as legislative intent:
[L]egislation cannot be interpreted according to legislative intent because, even in theory, it is often impossible to ascribe a single intent to a set of words that is the product of numerous different intentions. If 60 people vote for a provision, and 30 intend it to mean one thing, and the other 30 intend for it to mean the precise opposite, there is no coherent way to determine a single “intent” behind the text.
To those who argue that Congress really intended to include the words “established by the state” to enforce federalism, my question is: what if it were clear that was not Congress’s intent? What if every CongressCreature, upon voting for SCOTUSCare — whoops, I mean ObamaCare — signed an affidavit saying: “Our intent is for subsidies to be available to any citizen regardless of whether they obtained their plan on an exchange established by a state or by the HHS Secretary”? (Understand that the Constitution gives no legal authority to such affidavits; they would just be a road map to learning the legislators’ intent.) Assume further that the legislation that they actually passed said, just like it does today, that subsidies are available for those who obtain their insurance on exchanges “established by the state.”
Would you really feel any different? Really?
What Frey isn’t telling you here — and it’s a hallmark of his — is that of course he’s interested in legislative intent. If he weren’t, he couldn’t possibly treat the text of the law as anything more than an accident of random signifier distribution, as a Boggle game to be interpreted and legislated.
And not even he is that daft.
Instead, what he is not interested in here is an intent that the legislature may or may not have had but didn’t in any clear way signal. Or to put it another way, just because Justice Roberts claimed to be appealing to intent doesn’t make his maneuvering intentionalist (just as Scalia’s claim to be a “textualist” doesn’t prevent him from in most practical ways acting like the intentionalist he actually is): in fact, it isn’t interpretation if he is claiming to pull an unexpressed/unsignaled intent from the text, because we don’t need to “interpret” that which we already know. Instead, he is applying his own intent and attributing it to the legislature — which is, as we’ve seen, a gambit favored by textualists as a way to coopt the meaning of others.
Whether or not the legislature intended “state” to mean “both state and federal” is immaterial here. Because as I’ve noted time and again, nothing in intentionalism says that conventions surrounding legal interpretation, which are meant to ensure clarity, repeatability, and stability to a legal text, are to be jettisoned in favor of an unsignaled meaning. What it does say is that the legislature could very well have meant just what Justice Roberts says they meant (I have my doubts) and yet, because it didn’t express what it meant in a way that is clear, a Judge is compelled to return it to them to have them make their poorly signaled intent clear and unambiguous.
This is something we don’t require so much of literary texts; and yet the process of interpretation is exactly the same. The difference is the conventions surrounding the kinds of texts we’re engaging with: we don’t expect to find irony in an instruction manual from Ikea, though in fact in theory the whole thing could have been intended ironically without affecting the completion of the shelving unit; similarly, we don’t privilege poorly signaled or “secret” intent in legislative language, not because it can’t be there — a legislature can very easily try to sneak things through in such a way, and in fact Obama has relied upon plausibility to rewrite statutes at will — but rather because as those most affected by the performance of legislative texts (as laws, we are bound by them), we couldn’t possibly have divined the intent from the text as delivered.
One can mean and fail to signal that meaning in a way that is readily understood. That doesn’t mean the person hasn’t meant what he meant, only that he failed to signal his intent in a way that most people can readily understand. Nevertheless, convention is but an aid to divining intent; intent, which is what allows for signification, is always operable. It is up to us to decide if we privilege the intent of authors projecting their will into the world or of interpreters, who can either try to decode what the author meant (intepretation) or apply their own intentions and rewrite the texts entirely to lay claim to them.
It matters, for purposes of legal interpretation — and by way of legal convention — what intent is signaled. Textualism, in its effort to save us (unnecessarily) from “secret intentions” claiming privilege, abuses authorial control, turns it into a devious boogieman, and replaces it with the voice of an insentient thing, the “text”, that they claim speaks for itself. When what it really does, once they are through killing off the author and assuming control over his signifiers, having refused to acknowledge them as intended signs, is set the stage for their own control of a text, for their own claim to control of meaning.
Frey tries to finish with a flourish:
This reminds me of a hypothetical I offered in 2010:
Assume you make $50,000 a year. The legislature passes a law imposing a hefty tax on “people making over $100,000 per year.” Since the law does not apply to you, by its plain terms, you do not pay the tax. However, you are convicted after a judge finds irrefutable contemporaneous evidence showing that all legislators who voted for the tax intended to impose it on people making over $10,000 a year. The judge, an “intentionalist,” finds that the intent of the legislature controls, regardless of the plain meaning of the law.
Under the plain language of the law, the tax does not apply to you. Applying the intent of the legislators, it does. Which is the better interpretation?
My view was that the law would not apply to you, because “$100,000? means “$100,000.” Legislators can say all day long that they meant to say $10,000 — but if they didn’t include that extra zero in the law that was duly passed and signed, the text simply means what it means.To me, $100,000 means $100,000 — not $10,000. To me, this is as simple as saying “established by the state” means “established by the state” and not “established by the state or the Secretary of Health and Human Services.” You don’t need to get into the legislators’ heads — and it is foolish and indeed dangerous to even try to do so.
Again — and Frey knows this — there is no reason to “get into the legislators’ heads” whatsoever. If what the legislators meant was $10,000 instead of $100,000, they made a mistake, a typo, a transposition error, a boo-boo, and they need to fix it. Inventing nefarious readings by caricatures of intentionalist judges doesn’t make intentionalism nefarious. And in reality — as we see over and over and over again — the real problem we have, both in legal hermeneutics and in our everyday dealings with language — is that we are constantly bombarded by the “nuanced” readings of the clever folks who presume to rule over us, who replace our meanings with their own and then attribute the vitriol they create to us: thus, every mention of an illegal alien is racist and xenophobic; every disagreement with SSM is homophobic; we’re accused of speaking thru dog whistles, of exuding through our words, unconsciously, our discriminatory longings.
Like Frey, I’m not “an elite lawyer who went to Harvard or Yale and then went on to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States.” But I am an intentionalist, as are well all, and to be one in no way commits one to “ascribe to statutory language mysterious secret meanings that signify the opposite of the common understanding of the public,” as Frey quite disingenuously and — ahem, INTENTIONALLY — argues.
Concludes Frey:
I am a simple man. To me, the law means what it says. Nothing more and nothing less.
Personally, I’ve yet to meet the spontaneously generated text — be it on a Boggle board or in egret scratchings in the sand that look like a Wordworth poem — that I treat as something that can “speak” to me through any other means than my own desire to add signification to the marks. Or if you prefer, texts don’t speak: agency does.
Why this is important to keep in mind is that textualism moves control of the text’s meaning to the discretion of the interpreter by justifying the bracketing of its originating intent. It substitutes group will — and group perception, which is easy to manipulate — for the act of creation and meaning that comes from signification. As I noted upthread, in what really should be the takeaway in an essay that presses the importance of process
“To say […] “I know what you meant, but what you meant is signaled in such a way that it couldn’t possibly be interpreted as consonant with your intent unless [the receiver of the message] also knew beforehand what you meant […] is different from saying “I know what you meant, but what you meant doesn’t matter, because convention says you meant something else, and your intentions are irrelevant when it comes to determining what you meant.”
The former is intentionalism properly understood; the latter is how textualism is able to rob individuals of their will and replace it with their own, provided they can make their own will seem plausible to enough people.
This is not “democratization.” It is usurpation.
And it’s something even simple men like Frey (and Ed Driscoll) should be able to understand.
****
update: I have forwarded the link on to Ed Driscoll, who — as a PJ Media bigwig — ignored my last attempts to have a rebuttal posted. I expect this to meet the same fate.
The truth is, many of the megaphones on our side don’t much like me. And I don’t blame them, really: I have called them out when I believe them to be wrong just as readily (if not more so, because in most cases I consider them smarter) as I have the robotic, programmed leftists who mindlessly shoot shame bullets and luxuriate in hate and division. This hurts their feelings and necessitates my removal from their li’l gaggle of influence peddlers.
Still, we’ve made slow and steady progress recognizing the inherent dignity in our own ability to mean — to make an individual mark into an expression of our own will, which is what we do when we intend in language — and it would be a shame if some petty fool and his pride convinced people, with the help of fellow travelers who don’t much care about a rejoinder, that the way forward is the very way the left has over the last 70 years or so completely robbed the individual of any claim to autonomy and legitimate agency, namely, by embracing an idea of language that privileges communitarian, mob meaning, hidden under the rubric “perception,” to lay claim over the specific will of the individual.
Our oppression has come from just such a surrender. To renew our vows to that surrender because some lawyer wants to maintain his “right” to replace a manufactured consent with an individual expression is anti-conservative, anti-individualist, and anti-intellectual.
But then, who cares, anyway? Fixing things would mean we no longer need to gripe. And the gripe’s the thing.
I’m heading back to my hidey hole again. I have never needed to misrepresent someone’s arguments so blatantly and intentionally to make my points. Instead I try to carefully and deliberately argue against the assertions being made. That doesn’t play well in this era of 140 characters and online cliques. And I don’t expect anyone to feel the need to point any of that out. Because that would mean “getting involved” and it’s best, we’ve learned, just to sit back, be passive, and hope everything gets better all on its own.
What a bunch of craven eunuchs.
The problem is Jeff, you’re using intent (e.g. authorial intent) in a specific way, while the lawyers, like Scalia) are using it in a different specificity (e.g. legislative intent). And while you clearly see the overlap (intent can miscarry if you miscommunicate), they either can’t or don’t. (shorter Scalia: I don’t care what the Congress meant to do, I care what they actually communicated that they intended to do.) So for example, Congress meant to subsidize state exchanges, and wrote the law that way. Then, when that became politically inconvenient, the folks charged with administering the law decided the state meant federal because “nation-state baby!”
So when Roberts went along with it, (call it the Pee-Wee Herman test: they meant to do that) folks like you-know-who decided to take the opportunity to say “see, intentionalism is bullshit.,” when intentionalilsm, rightly understood, can only lead to the conclusion that the Court imposed their (and the administration’s) desiderata via post hoc reasoning on what Congress intended at the time of signification (i.e. put the screws to Republican governors and legislatures by holding out the promise of free money to the constituents of the aforementioned Republican politicians in order to create a wedge for Democrats.)
Put another way, the the desired outcome governs the intended inputs rather than the inputs determining the outcome, with faulty inputs resulting in a faulty outcome.
Thanks for popping in Jeff. Hope to see more of you soon.
Intentionalism, rightly understood, is crucial to salvaging meaning from the predation of the mob.
Those who insist, after having been shown otherwise, that we must maintain the pretense that a text can live alone outside of some controlling intent, I must conclude wish it to be so — and wish to live with all that comes with such a corruption of language.
Why doesn’t much matter anymore. They are part of the problem.
And another part of the problem is that people have been so dumbed down that they simply can’t work their way through this, or won’t, because it’s easier simply to accept the power that comes with the alternative, hoping that one day they may get to wield it, too.
Question: What is the point of talking about “congressional intent” in reference to SCOTUScare, when Congress didn’t write, much less read, the bill?
Not to take away from the conversation about intentionalism, mind. That bit just sticks in my craw.
identity, error, and the uses of deception: a corgi
Those who insist, after having been shown otherwise, that we must maintain the pretense that a text can live alone outside of some controlling intent…
…simply lack the imagination to place themselves in the position of the author as well as in that of the author’s intended audience.
Ernst Schreiber – good comment.
Does law describe the intended input into a process of fairness or the intended result?
Should the court privilege the congressional intent to improve “health care” or the intent to differentiate between federal and state exchanges?
Words intent a meaning
Meaning intends a process
Process intends an outcome
What I see Frey doing is arguing against Intentionalism of “outcome” without conceding the Intentionalism of “meaning”.
Wow. Quite a piece. Frey had me fooled for a while too. Lawyers, making their bacon by using words, ought to better understand the tools of the trade.
For some reason this reminds me of growing up while a kid in middle school, maybe earlier. My biggest vocabulary mentor was Edgar Allen Poe, read out of an old college English textbook that belonged to my mother. Poe used many unusual words, and you had to recognize and learn their meanings which were so different from today’s parlance. There were many footnotes to reveal the meanings. Soon I learned that if you had no understanding of the intention behind his choice of words, you would remain puzzled and lack the flavor of what he meant to convey.
The same thing occurred as I read Shakespeare. The notion that you could read him while disregarding the contemporary meaning of his words and the views of his time would render his plays absurd. Yet there was a trend (and may still be) to twist his work into a modernist pretzel. Some try to convince you that The Taming of the Shrew can be interpreted as a pro-feminist tract. Read that play and coerce yourself into believing that, and you will quickly find it boring, elliptical and a waste.
Different subject: I see Roger Simon has blurted another “let’s stop fighting one another” post declaring that SSM is no big deal. Let’s worry about Iran instead. You won’t be able to fight Iran when your culture discards more and more of the morality that tells you in the first place why you should fight Iran. The political forces willing to do so are on the losing side of the culture now. The culture that celebrates SSM has no interest in starting that battle against Iran or China or ISIS. Roger Simon is on that side of the culture whether he knows it or not.
Intentionalism of outcome is what Kennedy pretends to rule on in the Housing decision. Everything is intentionalism. That bit of jiggery-pokery merely privileges his intent while using “the statistics unconsciously ‘say’ x” to justify it.
— Just as the text of ACA didn’t manifestly “say” “state = federal” but must have intended to do so because the legislature clearly did, even if it didn’t. Ernst is right in his first comment — Frey saw an opening for this and like a good little Alinskyite “pragmatist” looking to gin up a power base, he seized on Roberts’ supposed appeal to intent and tied it to intentionalism, even KNOWING — and I’ll note here that my text was in “plain language” that any “fair” interpreter can easily understand — that intentionalism has naught to do with secret meanings as a practical matter in legal hermeneutics.
That I have explicitly said as much doesn’t matter. Now that I’m frozen out, Frey can dissemble and spread disinformation with impunity. He is a net harm to classical liberalism and a net gain for the kind of ideology that gives us shamings, excommunications, and “official” narratives. His pragmatism was actually the preferred intellectual stance preached by Alinsky. Textualism is the removal of the individual will from the texts of our culture and politics, allowing for the group will to replace them — and to argue that it is both legitimate to do so and illegitimate to do anything else.
Textualism that defines itself as “because we can’t know without any degree of absolute certainty what an intentional utterance means, we can therefore legitimately rely on any plausible meaning we can construct out of the signifiers and say that that is ALSO or ONLY what the text means (depending on our strategy at the moment)” doesn’t come across as a convincing maneuver. So it’s aims are hidden in “because we can’t know without any degree of absolute certainty what an intentional utterance means, we must therefore legitimately rely on what the text says to reasonable and fair people to decide what it means” — as if a text divorced from agency has a voice to begin with. The upshot of this? Any intention that animates a text be damned. We’ll do what we want with it. It’s in OUR house now, and it’s OURS to play with. Language isn’t about meaning making; it’s about playing Boggle for fun and profit.
That someone would pretend that kind of nonsense is conservative or a even coherent linguistic position marks that person as either a dupe or a scoundrel.
culture
picking the bones of the corpse
vulture, Driscoll
yeah, Simon and Driscoll, two sides of one coin in the exchange of the transvaluation of all “values”
I think they understand the tools of their trade very well. They score extra bacon for the creative ways in which they can make their words appear as somebody else’s.
The problem is with the judges who score pound the table (q.v.) points as extra credit.
< spit >
there were two of those in my last comment but which in error I didn’t encode correctly, and hence were not recognized by the WordPress function: one after “culture” and the second after the first “Driscoll”
Nobody with any real clout on the right has had the balls to even pretend there’s been an answer to Frey’s very dangerous, very sloppy, very intentional misrepresentation of what is, I think I’ve shown over the years myriad times in myriad ways, a fundamental tenet in the protection of individualism.
Go team!
In addition to there not being anything left worth fighting for, once we’re done ceding the culture to the Left in search of “common ground,” the Left won’t even be on our side, because they’ll all convert to Islam, since it’s all about Power and the means to the end of Power.
The ones that won’t be revealed as useful idiots, at any rate.
A peasant asks a dumb question: So the Congerss intended to improve insurance markets? That was sufficient excuse for SCOTUS to rewrite one bit of law? Why can’t I use the same reasons to discard the entire ACA since it has clearly made all medical insurance far more expensive, convoluted and inefficient?
I might note the title of the noxious law in question is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. King Roberts’s judicial fiat now makes this unaffordable law even more unaffordable. Methinks there be a contradiction lurking in the wordy shadows.
They voted to make that text the law. Whether they read it or not, that’s what they intended to do. That it produced bad law should be reason to invalidate it and return it to them for repair.
Simon is an atheist, yes? And has a gay son. And is a lapsed progressive. Just sayin’.
Maybe the Democrats can just petition the Court to impose single payer, and bypass the sausage making altogether. At this point, what difference does it make?
Yeah, Pablo. What would have been so wrong with directing Congress to correct it? It’s not like this crew of Republicans in Congress would have objected. They wanted the decision to fall as it did in King v Burwell.
Somebody ought to introduce a Bill called The More Betterer Act of 2015 -a blank sheet of paper sent to the President for his signature.
Be interesting to see what happens.
Wow, I think I just described the Left’s wet dream version of the Enabling Act!
A couple of years ago I predicted single-payer would be signed into law by 2025 or earlier, and that the president signing it would be Republican. I was wrong, because there will be no more Republican presidents. And now after SCOTUS has begun legislating from the bench, we will get single-payer by judicial fiat in a decade.
I look forward to the day Anthony Kennedy pens his opinions in iambic pentameter. Before then, he will go through a phase of lyric blank verse.
A saavy
Republicanconservative candidate for President would be demanding that Putin tell the American People what was on Hillary’s server, and that the Chinese tell the American People what’s in the OPM records that the Democrats are holding over Robertsand Boehner,
and McConnell.
If everything is Intentionalism, are we free to assign meaning to words, that resolves meaning in favor of the intended outcome if they are in conflict?
Words intent a meaning: state is one of fifty, fed is not
Meaning intends a process: subsidies to “state” exchanges, not to feds
Process intends an outcome1: states will establish exchanges to gain subsidies
Process intends an outcome2: improved health insurance market
Kennedy will only be allowed to write after Roberts has presided over the customary sacrifices and read the livers and entrails auspiciously.
How else is Kennedy to know what he’s to compose?
I tried an answer Frey over there (reposted in Jeff’s last post), but I don’t know how well I did. I know it made no impression on Frey…
Before I dash–
What we’re talking about is an Interpretive Key, whose intent, whose interpretation of a communicative act is going to prevail, the author’s or the reader’s. What happens when the reader’s interpretation is accepted as the default interpretation (i.e. the author doesn’t say what the author said, the author says what the reader says the author said) is on display the consequences for all to see, here.
So will SCOTUS now need an official Procurer of the Divinatory Beasts?
Frey lecturing folks on intentionalism is just almost as credible as Peewee Herman lecturing on number theory.
Neither of them understands even a little bit of those respective topics. I’m just guessing in Herman’s case; Frey has demonstrated to a QED that he understands intentionalism in a way that’s almost, but not quite, entirely wrong.
Of course, my understanding is only good enough to recognize that Frey has it wrong; not to actually instruct.
the output of millions of monkeys on millions of typewriters producing, by random selection, “pass the salt,”
Nowadays this seems to be an entirely legit method of drafting legislation, since all it takes to divine the meaning thereof is the oracular utterance of George W. Bush’s second choice for Chief Justice.
The rest of your example bypassed because your two outcomes aren’t actually in conflict, so there’s nothing to resolve.
That we’re pretending that there is a conflict (outcome 1 being the means to the end of outcome 2, and since state’s aren’t playing ball…), which , in order to resolve, we have to reinterpret intent (state is one of fifty OR Fed) in order to reach the desired* outcome (improved health insurance markets by means of state and Fed exchanges) demonstrates the vulnerability in textualism that Jeff is pointing out.
*desired, not intended because our intentions don’t always get us our desires. In this case Congress’s intentions went astray. The Supreme Court did Congress the discourtesy of cleaning up it’s mess instead of leaving it to them to sort out. That disrespects Seperation of Powers.
jls
do you speak only English? If you were to go to, say, Japan, when someone talks to you in Japanese, do you try to understand what the person is saying or do you just make up your own meaning?
Words are a means of communication. They have no meaning unless you and I have a mutual understanding of what those words will mean when we mutually use them.
Lots of young siblings, especially twins, coin their own words … a “secret” language only they understand. To adults, the words are nonsense until they discover what the child’s intended meaning is.
before a message can be created by one person and communicated to another, there is a lot of groundwork that has already gone into making the means of that communication easier.
But as we see, good faith efforts to be broadcast and receive messages goes awry when dealing with people who look at the means of communication as tools of authoritarianism.
Come to think of it, that demonstrated lack of respect for a Coequal branch of government, to my mind, justifies impeaching the majority in King v. Burwell for misdemeaning their Office.
Not that that will ever happen. So Congress is now stuck playing the snot-nosed minor partner to the paternal branches, who get to take turns wiping Congress’s runny little nose.
the right
Of course, there really is no right. WFB was arguably the last and even he was fighting a rear guard action.
The Right™ is what enabled the left for the last hundred years, never taking a single victory of note or substance. That codependency is what powered and still powers the left.
Yup. Saint Ronald, the archetype Conservative Executive did more to destroy the family than any single modern politician. As for encouraging jihad, he was second only to Jimmy Carter until SCOAMF showed up.
Darlene, thanks for the help but I am not taking issue with Jeff’s main thrust. I see Intentionalism as fundamental to communication just as you suggest. What I am trying to express is the conflict that can come between the Intentionalism of meaning and the Intentionalism of outcome.
Ernst Schreiber came close earlier with (shorter Scalia: I don’t care what the Congress meant to do, I care what they actually communicated that they intended to do.) Here we have Scalia saying – I think – he doesn’t care what Congress meant to accomplish, he only cares about the instruction they actually communicated about the process we should follow. I believe this distinction is what Scalia and Frey calls Textualism. It seems like a straight forward idea but surprisingly hard to communicate.
It appears you do not understand Scalia on secret meanings, jls. What is a secret meaning, a hidden intention, a deception, a lie?
I care what they actually communicated that they intended to do
Which is exactly what Jeff talks about the way judges need to look at law. — his $100,000 vs $10,000 example.
I earlier posted on the SCOTUScare case that Robert’s not only didn’t look at what was being communicated with plain language or the intent behind that language that was oft expressed by people like Gruber, but he overwrote both by referring to some “structural intent” …
e.g. Congress’s “good intentions” in wanting to SAVE healthcare not DESTROY it.
Hell’s cobblestones, right?
Like any tinpot dictator has never excused his grab of power by saying he is doing for the Best Interests of The People!
That would be because the American Right is really the right of the Enlightenment Left, I suppose.
So what’s the alternative? Throne and Altar?
I wonder if, at least to some degree, it must be.
De Maistre, we ain’t
Everybody’s familiar with Abbott and Costello’s Who’s On First? routine, right?
That only works if we understand that Abbott is trying to communicate information (Who is in fact the name of the first baseman) and Costello is misinterpreting Abbott to be repeating back his question (who’s on first?) Also, that at a different (meta?) level the comedians, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello intend for us to understand that they are play acting two individuals misundstanding one another. The joke doesn’t work if Costello’s interpretation is in fact epistemically correct (i.e. Abbot is simply repeating the question back to him).
My point being, only a certain kind of lawyer (critical theorist of whatever stripe, if you prefer) would want to hold some kind of public inquest (trial, reader poll, take your pick) to determine which one was the idiot, and which one was the asshole.
That’s what I meant by inability to place themselves in the position of both the author and the reader, or in this case, the speaker and the listener.
De Maistre, we ain’t
But maybe we should be, or at least consider his criticism of what we’ve come to call “the Enlightenment project.”
Anyway, I really want read him.
Starting with Berlin’s reading of him.
But damn if Beran (Knox Beran?) didn’t bother to cite his sources.
Damn I hate that.
Remind me to smack that ol’ tip jar in a couple of days!
Most people do not (meaning hardly anybody) bother to read John Locke’s First Treatise, let alone his more commonly read Second. It does seem to me however, that we American democratic-republican sorts side more comfortably with Locke, and not so much with de Maistre. Though I guess whether we should do is an open question.
I agree sdferr. I think the trick is to find the Hegelian synthesis of Locke and de Maistre.
The problem is that I don’t know if that’s even possible, since it’s my impression that Locke is founded upon Hobbes, and Hobbes turned Natural Law inside out.
I might be wrong about that, though.
Anyway, I think de Maistre’s admonition that man is not merely or purely a rational animal is a telling one.
Darlene – I care what they actually communicated that they intended to do.
“intended to do” is where the ambiguity lies. Roberts said he saw ambiguity between the overall intent of the law and the implementing language, which required him to look beyond the “plain meaning” to find an understanding that resolved the conflict. It wasn’t a “secret” meaning or an un-communicated intent, it was a conflict between a hierarchy of intents.
My question goes to how to resolve the conflict between “means and ends” Intentionalism.
I am always confused by the term natural law. Sometimes a strict catholic doctrine is meant, sometimes things like newtonian gravity, and other times the term natural right is substituted for by the term natural law (this, I believe, is also done in confusion). Anyhow, I suspect that there are substantial differences or distinctions worth preserving. What was Hobbes up to?
What was Hobbes up to?
Good question. Sometimes I suspect that it was telling Catholics to piss off.
My question goes to how to resolve the conflict between “means and ends” Intentionalism.
Speaking for myself, I think you do it by privileging the “means” intentionalists. (X is how we go about achieving Y) If X doesn’t achieve Y, tough shit, your intention miscarried, better luck next time.
The Courts are under no obligation to save lawmakers from their own (late night, single-vote tl;dr majority) stupidity. In fact, respect for separation of powers among co-equal branches of government demands that they don’t.
(I guess I’m about to find out if you’re serious or just trolling –hard to say, you’re not a regular commenter– since I’ve undoubtedly put a hanging curveball over the plate just now. Swing away.)
Sometimes I suspect that it was telling Catholics to piss off.
. . . or possibly more pointedly than mere Catholics, the Schoolmen, and hence, not so much Catholics as Aristotle.
Yup.
You don’t happen to know, off the top of your head, whether or not Hobbes was Calvinist, do you?
Ernst – is there a principle behind your choice or just personal preference?
On a related note:
Do you think fairness is a quality of a process or a feature of an outcome?
I don’t know what profession Hobbes may have made as regards worship
Ernst, but confess I’ve said before I view him as a garden variety atheist who knew better than to open his mouth about it.
The principal is that the author meant to say what the author said, and if the author didn’t mean to say that (e.g. the 10K vs. 100k example), it’s the author who’s obliged to correct the error, not the audience.
I really don’t give a shit about fairness. Welcome to Real Life (TM) as a wise man once said.
You know, I really hope you’re not fishing around looking for an opening to make an equality of outcome type argument.
Because That’s not faaaair! is the socialism of small children.
So, cards on the table, what do you think fairness is? Quality of process or feature of outcome?
Fairness is a quality of a process.
Care is a feature of an outcome.
If I shuffle and deal a hand of poker, is fairness in the shuffling and dealing or in the hand you get. If one person gets 4 aces and another none is that fair? Yes, if the process was fair, meaning the deck was shuffled and dealt without bias or trickery – a consistent application of the rules.
Roberts didn’t do that. Instead, he “saved” the law by rewriting it, by adding his own intentions to save the law to the signifiers “exchanges of the state” so that they now included the signified “and of the federal government.” There is nothing in that misuse of the interpretive process that an intentionalist would ever justify, support, applaud, or allow.
So which theory of signification DOES support what Roberts did?
Outside of the “We Philosopher Kings Do As We Please And Whatchu Gonna Do About It?” theory, that is.
More tiring than the textualists are the Wittgenstein adepts. New paradigms for discussion they believe alter the final outcome. But yet their shared structures of mind function in effect as my use of “agency.” Why they are so committed to refiguring everything I could never figure out, and many of them wind up sounding like mysticists despite Wittgenstein being anti-metaphysical by claim.
Roberts acted as a textualist and claimed to be privileging intent.
I’m off to wresting for a while.
Intentionalism: how you get there matters.
Hi dicentra, i am not saying you are wrong, just passing along Roberts justification. He says that statutory construction holds – unless – there is ambiguity, which then demands a deference to a larger context. His larger context seems to be the intended outcome of the law
The challengers had a “strong” case looking at the four words on their own, Roberts conceded, but the larger context of the law compelled the court “to depart from what would otherwise be the most natural reading of the pertinent statutory phrase.”
…
“The upshot of all this is that the phrase ‘an Exchange established by the State under [42 U. S. C. §18031]’ is properly viewed as ambiguous. The phrase may be limited in its reach to State Exchanges,” Roberts wrote. “But it is also possible that the phrase refers to all Exchanges—both State and Federal—at least for purposes of the tax credits.”
That’s where the textualism comes in. Because it takes a willful act to pretend that the text exists in a vacuum absent any context. Or, as Jeff wrote: “given what we’ve heard from Jonathan Gruber, or what Obama and other proponents of the ACA have said about the ultimate goal being a single payer system, the legislature, by failing not only to include “federal exchanges” in their text but by very pointedly relying on the specific “state exchanges,” in no way signaled the intent they [post hoc] claimed, and therefore need to rewrite the law to make that intent clear.”
I’ve heard to many “stacked deck” analogies from wannabe social justice warriors to trust ’em.
So pardon my hermeneutic of suspicion going forward here.
Frey has demonstrated to a QED that he understands intentionalism in a way that’s almost, but not quite, entirely wrong.
Frey absolutely understands what Jeff means. I’ve seen him articulate it correctly.
Frey also understand that (a) Jeff is quite a bit smarter than he is (b) Jeff has handily bested him in public, and (c) the only way for Frey to save face is to destroy Jeff.
Frey’s target is not intentionalism; it’s Jeff.
That’s all the math there is.
For Roberts to defer to political talking points as “the larger context” is obscene.
His obligation as a jurist was to say, “you guys need to rewrite this mess and vote on it again.”
But he knew that since the electorate had very systematically and deliberately changed the composition of Congress for the express purpose of getting rid of ACA, he couldn’t risk letting that happen.
Because the “will of the people,” as represented ONLY by the single-party vote that passed this piece of shit, is the only one that counts.
:: spit ::
At this point I think that Roberts either needed the money or doesn’t want the pictures leaked and to hell with words.
elsewhere
>For Roberts, however, this interpretation would defeat what he sees as the purpose of the Act: to expand insurance for those previously uninsured. If a state didn’t set up an exchange, the federal exchange operating in the state could not accomplish this purpose, because most people without insurance could not afford to purchase at market prices. Worse still, the lack of subsidies would create a risk of a “death spiral” in the availability of insurance. Because Congress prohibited insurers from excluding people with preexisting conditions, many people would wait to purchase insurance until they got sick—a rational decision for some, since even the cost of paying a fine for failing to comply with the mandate to buy insurance would be small compared with the amount required to buy unsubsidized insurance.
Roberts’s approach privileges the purpose or intent of the statute over the most plausible import of its text. It is not a novel move in statutory interpretation, and it has many adherents among legal theorists. The method works well, for instance, in interpreting the contracts made between two people—understanding their language not in terms of its plain meaning but in terms of the shared intent of the parties, i.e., the overriding purpose that the contract was intended to serve.
But as law professor Mark Movsesian has suggested, while such a method of interpretation may be appropriate for contracts, it is not appropriate for statutes. One formidable difficulty is that while a contract, when it is an agreement between two people, may have a single overriding purpose, federal legislation is a product of 535 legislators plus the president. It’s hard to distill an overriding intent or purpose from such a collection of wills, particularly in complex statutory schemes.
The Affordable Care Act is a case in point. While one objective was indeed to insure the uninsured, another was to encourage the states to experiment and to prevent undue location of authority in the federal government. As the now famous video by Jonathan Gruber shows, some of the ACA’s supporters embraced the natural purpose of the plain meaning of its subsidies provision. Permitting only state exchanges has the advantage of motivating each state to establish exchanges. Otherwise, their taxpayers will wind up paying for the subsidies in other states. Indeed, now that subsidies will become available on federal exchanges, a number of states will likely give up their exchanges, further centralizing power in the federal government.
Moreover, unlike a contract, a statute is written for people who are not parties to its making. This difference provides another reason to interpret a statute according to its plain text rather than forcing citizens to figure out which of many purposes the text should be thought to serve—let alone trying to divine the intentions of the legislators who passed it. In this sense, “textualism” reflects the rule of law, rather than that of particular people.
“Purposivism,” by contrast, makes the task of progressives easier. Textualism requires progressives to change the world expressly, one line of text at a time, but purposivism enlists the courts as allies. They can then use the broad purposes of the legislation to smooth out obstacles that compromises, mistakes, and tensions among multiple objectives may have created.<
http://www.city-journal.org/2015/eon0629jm.html
Also, since the federal exchanges are allowed because they make the aca easier, then some smart guy should create a competing, private exchange. Like an Angies list, but not run by a sex obsessed asshole.
If a lawyer (or, more importantly, a judge) can reinterpret laws, then they are The Great and Powerful Oz. If not, they’re basically a librarian. Which would you rather be (absent a sense of duty or morality), a librarian or The Great and Powerful Oz?
Judges have been reinterpreting the Constitution from almost day one. It’s horrifying, but it’s like asking a DMV clerk not to go to lunch in the middle of doing your paperwork. It’s what they do.
Heh. Frey, the DA. “Color of Law”, indeed.
I recall someone telling Frey that he might be acting like a DA. A Dumb Ass. Now, a civil trial looms.
There’s just not enough popcorn~!
What dicentra said at 5.38pm. To the fourth power.
Kimberlin’s suit is nonsense. He was basically suing the planet (From RS McCain to Glenn Beck to Simon & Schuster) and the single claim left is the only one of dozens that survived Motions to Dismiss. Frey is going to win that one as well, as he’s now got a ruling from the 9th Circus on whether his blogging is private or public action.
One almost wishes they both could lose, but Kimberlin really ought to still be in prison. Barring that, someone should be scraping him from the sole of their shoe.
here is an example of this post
>Eric Hoffer wrote, “Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all the unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without a belief in a devil.” We like to believe that religion is a benign or positive influence in the world. As much as I want to believe the positive aspects I have to admit based on the historical and sociological evidence that this is not so, especially during unsettled times of great change. We live in such an era and when it comes to identity and supremacy, God is the ultimate trump card and hatred in the name of God is something that many religious groups and people specialize.<
http://padresteve.com/2015/06/28/the-religious-right-unhinged-the-aftermath-of-obergfell-v-hodges/
notice an absence of God is really God's fault. don't follow the delusional.
So much for blind justice.
Hey, a classic Goldstein post in which he trots out his old hermeneutics essay for the thousandth time. I have to ask, is his plan really to do this over and over, quit and come back with the same material, until some miracle occurs? The only new activity we’ve seen from him in the past six months is his sad quest to insult someone like Amy Schumer or Lena Dunham on the twit machine in hopes that they’ll take offense, make their outrage viral, and create a firestorm that finally boosts his twitfollower number above 3,700. And that’s not working. At all.
In his own eyes and in the eyes of his eight remaining followers, Jeff was totally right about everything all along. The next question is, so what? A great many people have been ‘right’ about a great many things. The librul equivalent of Goldstein would be a guy who posts the same graph about income inequality every week while screaming ‘see, see I was right! I said ten years ago that unless the Democrats drove the corporatists from their ranks and embraced radical redistribution, exactly this scenario would occur! I was right all along and I demand that someone recognize this unalterable fact.’
Get some new material. Your followers are hungry for updates on the hunt for the fugitive Steven Goldstein and his ill-gotten monies. Or maybe just some more pics of the new house. These people have been illogically generous to you and they deserve a bone now and again instead of the same old crap. Time’s a-wasting. If you can’t make this thing work you’ll have to look for a real job someday. And for a creative writing major in the Colorado boonies, that would either mean the box factory or the drive-thru line at Arby’s. Tick tock.
Pablo
Haven’t been following that, but happy to see 9th court at least partially rule in favor of free speech.
Self-serving as I, too, am a county employee in a DA office (chief clerk)… just not Los Angeles County.
>Eric Hoffer wrote:
“The impression somehow prevails that the true believer, particularly the religious individual, is a humble person. The truth is the surrendering and humbling of the self breed pride and arrogance. The true believer is apt to see himself as one of the chosen, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a prince disguised in meekness, who is destined to inherit the earth and the kingdom of heaven too. He who is not of his faith is evil; he who will not listen will perish.”
That is why they, the religious true believers of any faith are capable of such great evil, and why such people can murder innocents in the most brutal manner simply because they do not believe correctly.
Please do not get me wrong.{insert calls to authority here} I am a Christian, a priest, a historian and a theologian, but I also know just how insidious those who hold their religion over those of others can be. While I hold faith dear, I know that it can be abused for the claim of some to have God as their final authority is a sort of trump card with which they are able to justify the most obscene and evil acts against others.<
http://padresteve.com/2015/06/28/the-religious-right-unhinged-the-aftermath-of-obergfell-v-hodges/
moral principle as "trump(you're fired) card" . you fail at everything you have done linguistically
I see augustus the breaded-fish troll has decided to crap on this thread.
Isn’t past your bedtime in Honea Path, South Carolina?
>Get some new material. Your followers are hungry for updates on the hunt for the fugitive Steven Goldstein and his ill-gotten monies. Or maybe just some more pics of the new house. These people have been illogically generous to you and they deserve a bone now and again instead of the same old crap. Time’s a-wasting. If you can’t make this thing work you’ll have to look for a real job someday. And for a creative writing major in the Colorado boonies, that would either mean the box factory or the drive-thru line at Arby’s. Tick tock. <
how much does "media matters for amerikkka" pay codfish? how was ferguson and baltimore? do stupid people lives matter?
Get some new material.
Translation: Silence, peasant!
Hm. Let me think about this… I suspect the answer will be: No.
Continue whingeing, please.
>update: I have forwarded the link on to Ed Driscoll, who — as a PJ Media bigwig — ignored my last attempts to have a rebuttal posted. I expect this to meet the same fate.<
Working for the Clampdown
>”Clampdown”
Hey, hey!
Ooh!
The kingdom is ransacked
the jewels all taken back
and the chopper descends
they’re hidden in the back
with a message on a half-baked tape
with the spool going round
saying I’m back here in this place
and I could cry
and there’s smoke you could click on
What are we gonna do now?
Taking off his turban, they said, is this man a Jew?
‘Cause they’re working for the clampdown
They put up a poster saying we earn more than you!
When we’re working for the clampdown
We will teach our twisted speech
To the young believers
We will train our blue-eyed men
To be young believers
The judge said five to ten, but I say double that again
I’m not working for the clampdown
No man born with a living soul
Can be working for the clampdown
Kick over the wall ’cause government’s to fall
How can you refuse it?
Let fury have the hour, anger can be power
D’you know that you can use it?
The voices in your head are calling
Stop wasting your time, there’s nothing coming
Only a fool would think someone could save you
The men at the factory are old and cunning
You don’t owe nothing, so boy get running
It’s the best years of your life they want to steal
You grow up and you calm down
You’re working for the clampdown
You start wearing the blue and brown
You’re working for the clampdown
So you got someone to boss around
It makes you feel big now
You drift until you brutalize
You made your first kill now
In these days of evil presidentes
Working for the clampdown
But lately one or two has fully paid their due
For working for the clampdown
Ha! Gitalong! Gitalong!
Working for the clampdown
Ha! Gitalong! Gitalong!
Working for the clampdown
Yeah I’m working hard in Harrisburg
Working hard in Petersburg
Working for the clampdown
Working for the clampdown
Ha! Gitalong! Gitalong
Begging to be melted down
Gitalong, gitalong<
link
The Clash – Clampdown
Roberts decided that it was the “intent” of Congress to make health insurance more affordable and so he rewrote, reinterpreted the law so as to make the subsidies available to all since that was the only way to make the mandated insurance more affordable to those living in the benighted exchangeless States.
That was one leg of the affordability stool.
Roberts better start working evenings and weekends. There will be a lot of re-write to be done soon.
Of course left unseen and unstated is that subsidies, for the insured, for the insurers, do not actually lower the cost of health insurance, they just shuffle and hide who is paying what monetary cost and other parts of the ACA will shuffle and hide just who is paying the non-monetary costs too. Hidden variables and agendas abound in the “Affordable Shit-sandwich Act.
I’d like to thank Jeff for popping out of his bunker long enough to give us this post as the topic for the day, even if, especially if, if didn’t agree with the troll. It was nice to see some familiar names commenting again. I thoroughly enjoyed everyone’s thoughtful comments, and I hope we get to do it again soon.
I have a few problems with Jeff, though I think I’m right around my 10 year anniversary commenting here. Most of the regulars here now were here when I arrived. Anyway, back to Jdff, whom for the purposes of this comment I’ll use third person.
I always wished he would spend more time in the comments joining in with the regulars more than just slapping down dumbasses like the current dumbass.
I always thought Jeff worried too much about all the pinheads respect and so was more defensive than anyone should have expected, given the quality of his work.
Witch brings me to what really bothers people about Jeff.
HE WAS RIGHT!!
And because dumbasses and pinheads didn’t want to hear it, or more likely couldn’t understand it, we are in the incredible mess we’re in, and sinking fast!
Shorter dumbass: I hate it when you’re right :-(
bravo mr. g. bravo
I am so tired.
No, really!
*zzz…*
More tl;dr which is what all writing, that has to make sense of the nonsense that is progressive-left ideology, must be. But that is a “feature” of their ideology and a “bug” for the rational.
Fucking A Bubba!
My Intent is to write something extremely meaningful after the : should you not find it such your interpretation is flawed
:
*sniff*
Soggy dictionaries?
*sniff…*
Positive Rights — Forward Ho!
I say we dust off and Article V this place from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
I heart Justice K.
He’s a good people!
I collect needy stalkers like kids collect baseball cards, or like freshovenbakedcodfish collects and catalogs clippings of me, my family, my house, my interests…
There’s creepy obsession, and then there’s a freshovenbakedremora that attaches to you hoping to suck off some sloppy second nutrients.
In other news, Obama halts the rise of the ocean — of…
If you check my Twitter feed, I’ve commented on “purposivism”. Because there’s no signaling of purpose — and Roberts gives himself leave to rule for a non-signaled or even counter purpose — he isn’t interpreting law. He’s acting as it’s editor and as such, he’s part of its rewriting.
Of means and ends: Outcome Intentionalism vs. Means Intentionalism
For the left, the ends justify the means: Outcome Intentionalism, privileges the intended result of a law or statute. Process and procedures are viewed as malleable components existing as simply means. Any ambiguity in word choice or parsing is resolved in favor of the intended outcome. If the founders intended dignity for all then meaning derives from that intention.
For the right, means justify the ends: Means Intentionalism, gives meaning to the procedures specified in the law or statute. Ends and outcomes are viewed as theoretical possibilities or possible results of the specified means but are seen as speculative and not controlling. If founders wanted dignity for all it was incumbent on them to specify the means if they wanted that intention be operationalized.
Intentionalism, so-called as (mis)understood by certain members of the legal profession:
Reader Response by a feminist critic: “That’s [ : ] sexist! Be gone, Pig.”
by a Black Liberation theorist “That’s [ : ] racist! Be gone, Pig”
by a queer theorist: “Witness the patriarchal heteronormativity inherent in the system! Help I’m being oppressed!”
[Gee, all these post-structuralist, deconstructionist, problematizing theorists sound alike, don’t they?]
Intentionalism rightly understood (i.e. the author of a text intends to communicate something and the reader ought to try to understand what the author intended to communicate instead of reworking the author’s text into, e.g. thoughtcrime ):
Okay, Dave J, we get that you think this whole “intentionalism thing” is silly. Thank you for your opinion.
jls, why are you busy making things up? It’s a peculiar behavior, is all.
jls — I think what you are getting close to is what is now being called purposivism. The only requirement seeming to be that you’re able to claim that the text is ambiguous — something you get to by way of textualism (you disregard the intent you’re seeing signaled and try to work the signifiers to form a pattern of minor incongruity) — in order to claim you know an overall corporate intent that has no where been signaled.
As intentionalists will note, even IF your reading of intent is correct, your job, by way of constitutional role and legal convention, the latter being an important convention for a stable rule of law, is to make sure that intent has been signaled so that the law can be read repeatedly using the same text by people who don’t seem to boast your special knowledge of a hidden intent. In the end, you are editing a co-writing a law to say that it comports with the intent you see. If you’re a doctoral candidate in English literature building this case, many will see it as clever; if you’re a SCOTUS Justice, many will find it wholly illegitimate and both self-serving and self-aggrandizing.
Jeff, how does intentionalism as an legal hermeneutic relate to originalism?
“in order to claim you know an overall corporate intent that has no where been signaled.”
Roberts apparently believes the “overall corporate intent” has been signaled. “Their purpose was to improve the health insurance market – not create chaos” [rough paraphrase]. Or look at the title of the act “Affordable Care”.
The question I am raising is how do we understand Intentionalism when the overall corporate intent has been signaled and there is “some” ambiguity in the implementing statue?
Does any “overall corporate intent” apply to the creation of the Article III courts? Was that intent such that these courts write or re-write law?
Watch your step Alice.
JG:
jls:
Aside from shrieking a day later about the proper role of the Court when it finally comes to gay marriage, Robert’s most offensive comment was how the ACA, based apparently on its label and not on both it’s hidden, Gruberesque intent and manifest outcome — both playing out for all of history even as he said it — could be interpreted as beneficient and good and proper.
Which earns Roberts some props for intent. Or divination. Or official capacity.
I’m still not sure which is the bigger lie, although either goes miles to establishing Robert’s legacy, that being how, say, the NYT comes to eventually but officially regard all politicians…
JHoward – do you know if Gruber’s interpretation of intent was part of the courts acceptable knowledge?
Answered you in a new post, Ernst. Mostly to piss of a fish. https://proteinwisdom.com/?p=57190
No. He believes he KNOWS it to be that, that the ambiguity he claims to have “found” in the text proper allows him to disregard what is to others that which IS clearly signaled, and therefore that he can become the text’s savior by claiming that a non-signaled intent was signaled to him, because, well, he says so. If he knows what the text means before interpreting it (if it’s purpose is signaled to him in the law’s title, say, however incredulous we may be to that explantion) — and he must have, because he’s appealing to that knowledge to make sense of his ruling — he didn’t actually interpret it the text at all. He interpreted what he believed to be the political desire around the text’s production.
He may as well have cited tea leaves and Tarot cards, or said, “the intent is clear because I have seen it as such, and it only takes one vote extra, because we already know the progressive activists are going to reason back from what they believe the outcome should be as a matter or political expedience.”
Of course, had he said that, even middle America and someone like Frey would know what he’s up to.
I’ll take a gander
What “signal?”
Which “signal?”
This”Signal?”
Best case is ambiguous intent, most likely is the intent to deceive because an accurate truthful “signal” would not achieve the end desired.
What “signal”?
This one: “I’d rather have this law than not.”
Let’s just go with that.
JHoward – do you know if Gruber’s interpretation of intent was part of the courts acceptable knowledge?
Gruber had previously defined the ACA’s intent, hadn’t he, and it was exactly counter to Robert’s interpretation of the ACA — and to its false branding — wherever Roberts gleaned it. Does this make Roberts an official of the State?
Would he also opine that Social Security was an instrument of security in society, while it’s amassed unfunded liabilities of tens of trillions of dollars and is legally not obligated to pay benefits?
That is, if you’re going to divine the Legislature, do you go by the labels on its bills or the outcome of its laws?
It’s remarkable even that we have to ask the question, so preposterous has this all become.
Wasn’t Gruber one of the guys who wrote the law?
Okay, one of the experts “consulted” by the elected lawmakers who wrote the law (even though we all know that the real work was done by legislative aids and all the lawmakers did was to show up and vote on a bill nobody bothered to read).
From my reading of Roberts opinion it seems he wasn’t aware of Gruber’s comments or the comments weren’t “official” knowledge. Roberts asked “Why would congress chose to exclude states from participating in subsidies when it goes against the purposiveness of the act itself?”
Gruber offered a rationale but it doesn’t seem as if Roberts knew of it. Absent Gruber is Roberts making an Intentionalist interpretation?
You’re one up on me; I’ve seen him get it wrong on any number of occasions. It’s not so much that he gets the theoretics wrong; he just comes up with hypothetical after hypothetical wherein he misapplies intentionalism.
It’s possible that, as you say, he got it right. Eventually. It’s also possible that I gave up paying attention after the first N wrong attempts; N being some arbitrarily large integer.
If patience is a virtue, dicentra, you could be up for sainthood.
Roberts knew it. He chose to pretend he didn’t. Because he had an agenda.
Why would Congress bother with state exchanges at all if the end goal was participating in subsidies? Federalism? Doesn’t seem very respectful of the States to tell them set up an exchange or we’ll set one up for you. Though I suspose you could argue what they were saying is you can set up an exchange, or not, either way, we’ve got it covered.
But that’s not really what they did, is it?
[I]s Roberts making an Intentionalist interpretation?
I would say he’s not.
You’re starting to remind me of Frey. I believe I’ve addressed this several times now. If he already knows what the purpose is even though it isn’t signaled and his ruling is based on what he believes that purpose to be, he doesn’t have to interpret at all. He’s making an intentionalist assertion and backing it up with is own textualist methodology, finding ambiguity in repeated and plain language that isn’t at all, given the internal logic of text, ambiguous in the slightest.
He is reasoning back from his own preconception and adding, through textualist manipulation of signifiers, the “ambiguous” rationale in order to justify privileging his own intent.
So to be extra, super clear: NO, he isn’t making an intentionalist interpretation that is valid in the realm of legal convention, even though he can lay claim to making an intentionalist assertion, and may even be able to make a (poor, it would have to be) argument that the legislature intended to do exactly what he says it intended to do.
Which wouldn’t matter, because said legislature didn’t signal that supposed intent it in a way that is recognizable to anyone who doesn’t lay claim to special knowledge not contained in the text that the Court is asked to rule on.
I’m not sure how much clear I can make it. And I’m certain I’m tired of trying, at least for a while.
[…] the comments to yesterday’s post, Ernst asks, “Jeff, how does intentionalism as an legal hermeneutic relate to […]
Re: Gruber and the law. More in confirmation of the previous link.
“Their purpose was to improve the health insurance market – not create chaos”
That’s ADVERTISING COPY, not intent. Their intent with respect to the “ambiguous language” was to encourage states to create their own exchanges by promising subsidies for those that did and by withholding subsidies from those that did not.
But then in practice everyone got subsidies, and if SCOTUS had ruled the other way, a lot of people would have lost their subsidies and there would have been weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.
That’s a political inconvenience based on a political miscalculation, and Roberts decided to do the Oministration a solid.
Because will of the people or some damned thing.
You’re one up on me; I’ve seen him get it wrong on any number of occasions.
It was only once, and it was during that long slog of which I witnessed every excruciating moment and comment, from here to Little Miss Attilla’s to a late-night IM session with me, Jeff, Pat, and a few of Pat’s goons.
Pat actually stated it right once, in one post, but doing so didn’t sufficiently humiliate Jeff, so he just kept at it, restating it just wrongly enough to keep the conversation going.
And going. And going. And going.
It wasn’t until Jeff offered to bring the tree to his own hanging that Pat finally got what he needed: a pretext to accuse Jeff of making violent threats.
And then Pat was positively gleeful (I kid you not), relishing right there in writing that he finally had a solid reason to condemn Jeff to hell. Comment after comment. It was positively surreal.
Never mind that what Jeff said wasn’t a violent threat by any sane definition — Pat had what he’d been digging for all along, for Jeff to stop with the clinically logical voice and mention something — ANYTHING — that fell outside the discussion at hand.
Pat knows what Jeff means but his Personality Disorder won’t let him admit that. The only thing for it was to make Jeff a hiss and a byword on the Starboard side.
And so he did.
He’s a stain. And he’s a distributed stain on the underpants of any number of people on “our” side who don’t bother checking themselves often enough for intellectual incontinence.
Jeff – I appreciate your patience and thank you for the effort.
What I hear you saying, is that the ACA did not signal its corporate purpose through the written word, therefore Robert’s assumes his role as an “author” of a new text as opposed to an “interpreter” of the existing text… Understood.
What I had hoped to hear your thoughts on was: What if the corporate intent was signaled and there was ambiguity in the implementing means? In other words should we privilege the intention of means or ends.
I am also wondering if you see a correlation between the above choice and the following:
Left > Care/harm > Ends justify means
Right > Fairness/cheating > Means justify ends
Thanks again.
What if the corporate intent was signaled and there was ambiguity in the implementing means?
Send the thing back to be rewritten and re-ratified to correct the ambiguity.
It is not any justice’s job to determine whether the implementation of the law supports its putative goals.
Not even CLOSE. They’re supposed to rule on a case based on what the law says. If they can’t tell, they are morally obligated to decline to rule.
Judicial restraint also means (a) not hearing cases where federal law has no jurisdiction (b) insisting that legislation — especially fresh legislation — be written clearly according to legal conventions before any ruling can be issued.
But what fun is that?
Left > Care/harm > Ends justify means
Right > Fairness/cheating > Means justify ends
That would be nice.
Left > We want all the power > By any means necessary > Including lying about our motives by couching a particular act in terms of sweetness and light.
Right > We want the rule of law > Which requires rigor in applying the methods > And if the means produce a bad end we have to live with it or fix the system.
Your dichotomy isn’t a bad one from a theoretical standpoint but it doesn’t map to political/social reality.
All human societies produce sociopaths (4%) and narcissists (10%) — badly damaged people, a subset of whom channel their damaged desires toward the accrual of power over others.
Power for its own sake, that is, because they need the head rush to feel alive (sociopaths) or to fill the Big Empty (narcissists).
The clever and charismatic among them manage to find ways to get what they want, either through brute force (Mao, Hitler, Stalin) or by incremental means (American Progressives). Sociopaths get an especial thrill out of manipulating people into doing what they want. Con artists large and small amuse themselves endlessly by tricking people into giving them money or privileges or whatever. Narcissists are also manipulative but are emotionally invested in grandiosity. Sociopaths just don’t give a rip.
Sociopaths have discovered that the best tool in their manipulation toolbox is to make people feel sorry for them. Pity and guilt, not fear, is the fastest way to break down a normal person’s resistance.
That is why the left always “champions the downtrodden”: they make everyone feel pity and guilt for their putative charges, and few are those who have the heart (or the savvy) to say NO to the puppy-dog eyes.
You might have noticed that the downtrodden never benefit from the actions of their “champions,” who were only using the disadvantaged as a means to an end.
Hence the pro-SSM argument is about people’s hurt feelings, who are told that they cannot marry whom they love, rather than discussing whether male/female complementarity has persisted throughout the ages because it has needed to or whether we’re so damned smart we can reject such things out of hand because we have smart phones and our parents didn’t.
See how you put “care/harm” in the paradigm for the left?
That’s emotional manipulation, pure and simple. The inducing of pity as a means to accrue power, not as a means to provide relief to the suffering.
Sorry, but there it is.
So, Jeff is like the Scooter Libbey of the blogosphere?
I didn’t know a righteous outrage trap was a real thing.
My take on Gruber and the ACA.
The “intent” that was written into the law was to hide what it would actually do when passed and administered. Gruber was a major player in that deception.
What was to be hidden was that the ACA would make the entire healthcare industry and the health insurance industry under the control (some de jure and most de facto) of the Sec. of HHS and thus the President. That in turn would give them the power to so damage the entire health insurance industry and the healthcare services sector that a single payer system would be seen, by the political class, as the only way to “solve” the mess. Single payer was the end goal, ACA was just a means to get there.
I don’t get all the system building (“Words intent a meaning/Meaning intends a process/Process intends an outcome; Outcome Intentionalism vs. Means Intentionalism; Left > Care/harm > Ends justify means | Right > Fairness/cheating > Means justify ends”). You’re either reading the plain language of the text or you’re substituting your own language for what’s in front of you (even if you’re using the printed words on the piece of paper to do so).
Never mind. I figured it out. It’s about Rules of the Game.
Ernst, I tend to agree with you before you changed your mind. There is no such thing as “Outcome Intentionalism.”
If Jeff ever gets a job at Arby’s then I will drive to Colorado for a meat mountain at least once a month. This I swear.
For a lawyer, their might be. I think the reason Jeff gives lawyers fits (before it got personal and crazy as a bag of cats) is that he (more accurately “we” or maybe even just “I”) he’s approaching this a dialog or argument between two sides of a political issue. But in a legal argument, there are three sides, and one of those three sides ultimately decides what the other two sides intended to mean.
Hence, Rules of the Game. What’s the open process to which we’re all going to agree in advance that will determine the outcome of our argument (and where’s the wiggle room for me to try to gain a competitive advantage by working the ref, as it were)?
Apologies if I’ve mischaracterized anybody’s position. It certainly wasn’t intentional.
dicentra – sounds like you have given this some thought. Here’s a little more of my theory.. it seems to tie in with your views.
My theory – of understanding the left right divide – goes to how the three core moral centers are integrated by the left and right.
The right understands morality as a balance between Liberty/oppression, Care/harm and Fairness/cheating. Where each is in tension with the other and morality is found as a balance between the three. For the right, self-interest is distinguishable from selfish –interest.
The left has a single-lens view focused on Care/harm with Liberty and Fairness reconstructed to serve the single lens. Here, morality is a balance in time, where self-interested acts are balanced by other –interested acts. Self-interest is indistinguishable from selfish-interest. Compelled care is the best care of all.
The left’s worldview or organizing principle is the victim-oppressor-champion triad with the left serving as the champion of the oppressed. By compelling the oppressor to provide care to the victims, the champion gains a moral credit, which brings a selfish indulgence or license.
The triad integrates the impulse for Care – which come from the benefits provided to the downtrodden – with the impulse for power, which comes from the support given to the champion by the victims. The left uses power to force care and in return gains power from the support of the under privileged.
To be clear, I put Care/harm in both left and right, but for the right Care/Fairness/and Liberty must sit in a balance. For the left, Care is the only moral imperative with fairness and liberty serving as supporting cast.
it seems to tie in with your views.
It does not.
You’re assuming that the Left’s presented arguments are a reflection of what they believe or value.
After all, that’s how the Right argues: we have the delusion that if only we could present our arguments, then people would change their minds, because our arguments are so reasonable and we’ve got all these facts on our side.
And so when we argue online, we are doing our very best to explain our PoV in the hopes of winning a convert. We are NOT trying to obfuscate, intimidate, or gaslight our interlocutors. (Well, not unless they deserve it.)
You might be describing what form the Left’s arguments take, but if you fail to account for the fact that the arguments are being made for the purpose of manipulation and not to delineate an actual world view, you are wasting your time.
Example: In preparation for a piano recital, you play your piece for three people. Person A genuinely wants you to become the best piano player you can be. Person B wants you to do him a favor later. Person C wants to demoralize you into turning in a bad performance, just to see if he can do it.
Person A gives you an honest evaluation of your strengths and weaknesses.
Person B talks about the impact your playing had on him (“I thought I was in the presence of Rachmaninoff himself!”).
Person C casually wonders whether all that work you put into learning that piece weren’t better used in helping the poor: after all, a performance lasts only a few minutes and then is gone forever, and music doesn’t feed the bulldog. I mean, it’s lovely and all, but most people on the planet can’t afford to take piano lessons.
How should you react to that feedback?
I’ll tell you how you DO NOT react to it. You do not take the time to notice that Person A focused on your technique whereas Person B provided a subjective reaction and Person C put your piano-playing in a larger context, and then attempt to reconcile or catalog or analyze the three reactions.
No you do not.
Instead, you listen to what Person A said and the other two you discard out of hand.
Because whatever form those arguments took, they were made in bad faith and not with the aim of helping you improve your performance.
PERIOD.
Stop restating your paradigm. It’s worse than engaging in mere intellectual exercise because it fails to take bad faith into account, and that failure has been our undoing.
sounds like you have given this some thought
Some thought?
SOME THOUGHT?????
Cripes.
But what if it’s a paradigm trap(!)?
[…] The Mailbox As Edmund Burke said: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” […]
dicentra –
I agree with much of your response but don’t understand your issue. I take it that you see the attribution of Care, as a motivator for the left, as wrongheaded or misguided. At least that’s what you said earlier so I assume that must be the unsigned issue.
My starting point, is that as a species we have a set of core moralities, which counterbalance our primitive impulses:
Care/harm: which is the urge to protect the weak and dependent
Fairness/cheating: which alerts us to dangers of cooperative behavior
Liberty/oppression: the instinct to be free and sovereign
I assume both left and right have these moral centers but differ in how they are organized and how they interact.
Are we good so far?
>I assume both left and right have these moral centers but differ in how they are organized and how they interact. <
dude proggtards
leftonly care about power by any means necessary.I spent quite some time writing something here, something I thought devastating in its attempts to piss on the person providing the site for me to jizz all over, but now it’s gone.
I guess Goldstein isn’t as stupid as I thought he was!
But no worries: I’ll tell Patrick Frey that he’s altered my comments, and perhaps I can have Frey start an email chain to get him thrown off Twitter!
You remind me of a Reagan quote fish person. Something like: the problem with liberals isn’t that they know so little, but that they know so much that isn’t true.
Also whoever said ” that boy’s a mile wide and an inch deep”
Also, I sense a bit of desperation and shrillness in his insults.
*cou-PROJECTION-gh*
Sorry, a bit dusty in here.
> also predicted that Obama would wipe the electoral floor with Mitt Romney’s perfumed ass. Since I was right on all counts, how much Cassandra cred do I get for it and how long can I flog it? <
you are really fucking stupid special snow flake. you want wipe the electoral floor? see 1980 & 1984. where's the beef dick head?
>Also, I sense a bit of desperation and shrillness in his insults <
anger is an energy
Public Image Ltd – Rise
>If Goldstein had said years ago that the Republicans are going to be such a party of obstructionist dickbags that a conservative Chief Justice will be forced to throw up his hands and say ‘really, you assholes are going to leave the dirty work to me because you don’t want to piss off your ignorant redneck base? Fine, done,’ then I would give him full props for prescience. <
quit stealing the baracky's straw men arguments loser
Don’t worry about the fish. Without me he wouldn’t exist. He needs me for his very nourishment. Craves my presence. Hopes for my attentions.
But I think I’ll just fuck with his comments instead.
I take it that you see the attribution of Care, as a motivator for the left, as wrongheaded or misguided.
I take it as a LIE.
They are motivated by a desire for POWER. They lie about that desire and SAY they are all about the caring.
To tug at your heartstrings so you’ll give them more POWER to make the puppies not be sad anymore.
You don’t have to be on the Left to give a rip about people. In fact, those of us on the Starboard side are far more likely to give our own time and money to help suffering and are opposed to the Left’s prescriptions for remedying suffering not because they’re operating from a flawed paradigm but because those remedies do unspeakable harm to their targets.
If you want to pursue that dichotomy independently of the political spectrum, then be my guest. Obliterate “right” and “left” and use other terms.
Otherwise, after writing two exquisitely clear posts on the subject (now three), I am forced to conclude that you are far too interested in your intellectual musings to grok what I’m saying.
Your rephrasings of my posts are way, waaaaaay off. Too far off for me to attribute them to ignorance.
We need to invite more insufferable trolls over here so Jeff can rewrite their comments.
They’re EVER so much more entertaining than the originals.
I think I’ve experienced Jeff’s difficulties on a smaller scale – there have been times when I was absolutely right, but was not able to convince.
Jeff shows that there are true and vitally important concepts that have huge impact on our lives – and that they cannot be compressed to a bumper sticker or a tweet.
That’s a bad match for modern sensibilities, sadly.
Who was it that said “There is almost nothing most men won’t do to avoid the true labor of thinking.”? Mark Twain, maybe?
[…] the Health of a Society. It provides an absolutely necessary Stability to said Society by making, as Jeff Goldstein puts it: ‘sure that intent has been signaled so that the law can be read repeatedly using the same […]
“They are motivated by a desire for POWER. They lie about that desire and SAY they are all about the caring.”
Can you see caring liberals, teamed with power hungry leftist, operating in a symbiotic bond?
Caring, huh? That’s what people call never looking at the effects of failed policy now? Never admitting terrible error, never admitting ghastly mistake, never admitting abject stupidity? Oh.
caring liberals
subjective sentimentalitsts?\
Off to take a dip in vinegar!
brb
Three main divisions are in the left coalition. The “caring liberals” aka “the wealthy” (not the “rich” who are the upper-middle class) and the government union workers. The grievance groups, poor, feminist, black, hispanic, LGBT etc. And at the top the power seeking sociopaths aka community organizers, leaders.
The relationship of the top to the others goes like this.
To the wealthy, “We will tax those pesky guys just below you and help keep them in their place, we will use the money to pay off and satiate the howling mob of the poor so that they don’t come to your door with ropes.”
To the poor, “We will take money from those lucky rich guys and give it to you.”
To the government employees, “We will siphon most of the money off into your hands on its way to the poor and we shall both get lauded as caring, loving, good people for it.”
To the other grievance groups, “We will show you what the solution to all your problems is and ensure that the government employees implement that solution.” Unstated is that the “solution” will only cosmetically “solve” their “problem.” It will lead to even more “problems” to be “solved.” And most importantly the favored “solutions” will give more power and money to the sociopath/organizers which is the whole of the reason for all the “problem” — “solution” dance.
Of course the whole edifice is built on and sustained by lies upon lies upon lies. Everything said by the “organizers” is a lie aimed to keep the dance toward power going on just a day/week/month longer.
Pass the salt, please.
“Sentimentalism and subjectivism are both caused by not having an agreed external authority and by an underlying relativism.”
The challenge, as I see it, is not sentimentalism itself but unconstrained sentimentalism. A moral architecture that balances Care/Fairness/Liberty limits the extremes. For example, if the urge to provide protective care for the needy, is constrained by a need for Fairness and a respect for the liberty of others, then sentimentalism is self constrained and useful.
The problem comes with an unconstrained Care focused sentimentality.
geoffb – i agree, Here’s my take on the divisions – from a paper i am writing.
The narrative casts the three parts as follows:
? The Noble Victim gains sympathy by the very fact of their victimization. Unethical acts, which would otherwise be seen as immoral, are excused as simply a justifiable reaction to past wrongs: When African Americans burn and loot buildings in Ferguson, it is a reaction to past oppression, and not the acts of moral agents. When Islamic terrorists fly airplanes into buildings the first question the left asks is, “What did America do to bring this on?” Once assigned to a victim class, a person’s moral responsibility is relieved and guilt is assigned to the oppressors. The first rule of the lefts victimology is that you can never blame the victim. Any blame is automatically assigned to the oppressor class.
? The Righteous Champion gains virtue through their advocacy in service to the Noble Victim. People of this circumstance would ordinarily be assigned to the oppressor class by virtue of their position of power. However, given their dedication serving as the agents of the oppressed, they gain moral immunity. Unlike the Noble Victims who lack moral agency – victims simply, react to oppression – the Righteous Champion acts with agency but gains virtue based on their intended good effects. In other words, again we see that morality is no longer judged by the act itself, or even the actual effects, but instead is based on group affiliation and the intended effects associate with that group’s alignment: The actions of Righteous Champions are righteous because that is what those of this group do by definition. The only qualification is they must have the good intentions of equality.
? The Oppressor lacks virtue and carries no redeeming qualities because their very existence is the source of evil. This evil shows itself as inequality, which is a byproduct of the oppressor’s selfish pursuits. Any act by the oppressor, which serves to sustain their position of material affluence, is seen through this lens where ones gain must come at the expense of another’s suffering.
De Sousa presents the parable to illustrate the morality associated with redistribution, but as you see, the triad is fundamental to the left. It grows from the Care focused Moral architecture and it serves their single lens moral balancing. The triad is just another form of the compelled care we mentioned earlier. There we noted, to the left, compelled care was the best care of all. It brings benefits to the liberal without requiring them to bear the costs, it masks self-interest under the guise of other-interest and it gains a moral credit, which grants a license or self-indulgence as part of their moral balancing.
Selfishness is the immorality, inequality the manifestation.
I have to run but i will read more closely later.
Lionel Trilling argued that Care was both a deceptive pretext for pursuing power and a self-justification for exercising power over others.
So much for constrained sentimentalism,
he noted sardonically.
Jls, I think I know what you are trying to figure out, but what strikes me is you are trying to do it using the lefts terms, which take you straight down the rabbit hole.
For instance, selfishness isn’t self interest, and equality before the law isn’t equality in life.
Self interest is a virtue, it compels one to not be a burden on others, and it’s a guide for the virtue of charity (give a hungry man a fish, he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime…and also he will be able to give fish himself, not take them).
Equality before the law is a virtue, equality in life is an impossibility in a free society where people are at liberty to pursue their own self interest. Is why attempts to
createimpose equality in life are tyrannical and anti-liberty. It requires mandating conformity resulting in the modern circus of requiring citizens purchase health insurance, pretending gender is subjective, generational welfare, multi- culturalism, and on and on from banning rebel symbols to “hate crimes”.In other words, you are trying to see reason in the irrational. You may as well try making sense of a woman suffering PMS.
Can you see caring liberals, teamed with power hungry leftist, operating in a symbiotic bond?
What I see are:
— People for whom it is vitally important that they be seen as moral, but they’re not very deep or introspective, so they grasp for the cheapest source of grace available — aligning with the group whose packaging has the word “caring” on it, but they never look any deeper.
— People who genuinely want to help the poor but have been conditioned to see poverty in the West as de facto evidence of malice in the successful. Such a paradigm might be true in prime-divider societies (medieval Europe, Muslim nations, totalitarian systems) but it is NOT true in the West. They have swallowed University Marxism whole, uncritically and dogmatically, and lack the ability to perceive reality as it is. Specifically, they actively deny that the pathology of dependency that has ruined generations of poor families in this country is the result of policies they approve of.
I have very little tolerance for shallow people and for people who cannot perceive evil when it’s right in front of them. Instead of making things better they make them worse, all the while flattering themselves that they’re “the good guys.”
It’s that self-flattery — my intentions are good, I’m reasonable, I’m moderate, I care — that leads people to join in with the worst elements of society. Unable to detect sophistry and unwilling to look behind the curtain, they let themselves be flattered by sociopaths.
I CANNOT respect that. Not in the slightest.
I’m reading the Bonhoeffer book (Metaxas) and it’s frustrating to see how only a handful of people understood how evil Hitler was, and how priests and pastors continued to think that Hitler could be reasoned with (a type of “optimism” that is always FATAL) even after he made the church expel all Jews, including those who were converts to Christianity.
Even after the night of long knives they didn’t get it.
Remember that Niemöller poem?
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
He’s speaking from experience. He was a personal friend of Bonhoeffer, who was adamant about what they were up against, and still he refused to see that “things really were that bad.”
Until he was made to see.
Here’s a more recent example:
I don’t care that the liberals care about caring.
They care about their own vanity more than the people they supposedly care about. They unquestioningly buy the lie that conservatives are horrible, selfish people and they’ll be damned before they say or do or think anything that would put themselves in that group.
I accept that there are decent people on the other side of the ideological divide, just as I accept that we’ve got our own sociopaths and narcissists and scoundrels and vain, shallow thinkers “over here.”
But I will call out those of “our team” who are bad apples. (And as Jeff can testify, that gets you tossed out of the club.) I am not tribal about my associations, be they religious or political or national. I don’t care what color your team jersey is — if you’re a decent person who can spot evil and name it, I’ll gladly have you in my foxhole. And if you’re a member of all my tribes but you’re a sophist or a moron, get off my lawn.
If you want to help the poor then help them, but be clear-eyed about the true nature of their situation and why they’re there. In America, it’s social pathology that keeps people down (unlike India’s caste system that pegs you from birth).
Your analogy of the fairly shuffled deck works IN CARD GAMES. It’s a fallacy to assume that conservatives reckon that whatever cards you’re dealt, that’s fair and one should shut up and take it. The analogy fails because the guy who’s dealt four aces and a king will not draw any more cards, whereas the guy with the poor hand is still subject to the luck of the draw. It’s true that a skilled player can make more of his hand than a novice, but he’s still limited by the fact that the four aces and king aren’t in the draw pile. Cards is a zero-sum game.
The better analogy is that there’s a mountain to climb and that people start out at different points. For those starting nearer the top, of COURSE it’s easier to get to the summit. But those nearer the bottom are not prevented from reaching the top by the fact that others got there first.
So you provide water and supplies and encouragement for those who have a tougher slog. We’re not heartless; we just know what needs to be done to reach the top. If you want what I have then you have to do what I’ve done, even if it’s harder for you and easier for me.
Capiche?
Interesting that in that three-part narrative you don’t have any actual virtuous actors, just people who are labeled virtuous and people who are actually bad.
Do notice that nobody is judged fairly or rationally in that paradigm.
It also sounds like somebody needs to review the Evan Sayet speech.
Poor, sad little man. I mean he wrote the flipping book(!), and still he chooses to not get it.
to the left, compelled care was the best care of all. It brings benefits to the liberal without requiring them to bear the costs, it masks self-interest under the guise of other-interest and it gains a moral credit, which grants a license or self-indulgence as part of their moral balancing.
And the “care” doesn’t actually redound to the benefit of the “cared for.”
Brush up on the relationship between the Jem’Hadar and the Founders and their “gift” of Ketracel White.
Poor, sad little man. I mean he wrote the flipping book(!), and still he chooses to not get it.
I’m not sure what to make of that. His National Review article on giving an SJW a cookie certainly registers how relentless they are and recognizes their desire to silence dissent:
OTOH, Steyn is always several years ahead of most other starboard-side pundits when it comes to likely results, and he’s never foolishly optimistic. Even when he’s on Hewitt’s show, he doesn’t hesitate to condemn the Republican Party as Lost To Us, despite Hugh’s idiotic insistence on calling them all “good men.” (Some of that is to maintain access, but Hugh really IS a moron when it comes to detecting evil that wears his team jersey.)
You’re link is bad, Di, but I can wander over there and find it for myself.
Some of us knew it was lie before now. More of us should have. And some of us (I’m looking right at your silly goatee’d mug, Mr. Goldberg) really have no excuse for not knowing.
But that’s what you get for assuming the goodwill that’s neither been demonstrated nor reciprocated. (Something for our friend jls to bear in mind.)
Meanwhile, down in Wonderland, it’s because Takei cares deeply.
Hey, I never knew this:
Since Takei seems particularly hissy about Thomas’ comments about “dignity”, I have a few questions
George, did FDR “steal” your parents’ dignity when he interned them during WWII? Did he “steal” yours?
And where is the government certificate that issued back your dignity after you got out? I’d sure like to see that.
Here’s some queer shit:
I bet Takei thought mattress girl had dignity.
This is where you go if you believe rights come from government, you believe dignity (the progg version of) then must derive from government.
But, up is down, no H8 is contempt, and dignity comes from without.
Well, Thomas isn’t you know, black black, and since Takei is a double minority (homosexual, asian-American)….
Speaking of the heirarchy of victimhood, it’s going to interesting to see how moral authoriteh gets sorted out post-Obergefell. e. g. pretty co-ed out clubbing slaps heterosexual man in the face for making a crude, drunken pass at her, she’s the victim. Same pretty young co-ed out clubbing slaps lesbian woman in the face for making a crude, drunken pass, does that make her homophobic?
Slaves had (and where slavery still exists, have) dignity because they’re human beings, made in the image and likeness of God. That’s why slavery was (and still is) wrong. It’s also why slave systems work so hard to degrade people trapped in the condition of slavery; it’s necessary to justify to the rest of society why slaves are deserving of their state.
The same can be said to hold for the concentration camps, the gulags, the killing fields, and whatever the hell its called where Mao moved all those city kids out into the country druing the Cultural Revolution.
LBascom – Good comment. Of course the victim-oppressor-champion narrative is all from the left’s point of view.
As to self-interest being immoral I should elaborate. That is the lefts perspective but not the rights. For the right, morality is constrained by Care/Fairness/Liberty, and as long as self-interested behavior falls within those confines, the behavior is moral. Only if one or more is violated does an activity become immoral and then the immorality is a violation of that center. i.e. Theft may be self interested but it’s the violation of Fairness that brings the immorality.
The left’s the moral architecture has only one effective center – Care/harm. With this single lens view any act is either self-interested or other-interested aka immoral. To be a good person the left has to balance their immoral acts of selfishness with a corresponding set of other-interested acts. Their alternative is to mask their self-interested acts or engage in compelled Care.
The center of the left’s moral architecture is power. When they have it, it’s moral. The ends for which they wield it are moral. When they don’t have it, it’s immoral. The ends for which others wield power are suspect; even if, especially if, it’s in a cause the left purports to support.
A bit more from the book i am writing:
Moral Balancing and Ethical Mindset
In a recent study, Gert Cornelissen (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain) demonstrated how the left and the right differ in their response to moral dilemmas. The study documented how people with an “ends justify the means” ethical mindset responded to moral dilemmas when primed with a preceding event. The results were then compared to the response from those with a “principled based” mindset. When the preceding event was a moral positive the left leaning subjects were inclined to respond with a moral negative and vice versa. On the other hand subjects with a “principle based” mindset were inclined to respond in a consistent manner. Moral positives were followed with moral positives and likewise with moral negatives. Cornelissen characterized the lefts response as “Moral balancing” and the rights as “Moral consistency”.
Moral balancing suggests that everyone has a “moral set point,” and subconsciously keeps count of their good and bad deeds in an effort to stay close to that moral set point – doing enough good deeds allows people to feel that they can cheat and behave a little badly, while doing too many bad deeds means they owe a moral debt to behave better…
People with an “ends justify the means” mindset are more likely to balance their good deeds and bad deeds, while people who believe in a fundamental difference between right and wrong are more likely to be consistent in their behavior, even if it is bad behavior.
The following discussion supports Cornelissen’s conclusions but goes further by providing a philosophical underpinning, and looks at the consequences, of a single moral center versus a multiple view. In the previous chapter “The Moral Basis of the Right Left Divide“, we made the case for understanding the difference between the left and right, as a difference in the lenses through which each side views the moral world: The left through the single lens of “Care/harm” and the right through a composite of “Care, Fairness and Liberty”. In this chapter we take that analysis one level deeper to explain how each of these moral architectures work and the associated consequences of adopting one or the other. Here we will show:
• How Cornelissen’s study supports and provides empirical evidence of the dual “lens” view.
• How a person’s view of “self” and moral behavior derives directly from the dual lens architecture.
• How the single lens and the multiple lens orientation manifest themselves in actual examples.
• We will show the logical implications and consequences when the lefts single lens views of “Care-only” becomes ascendant in society.
>The Moral Basis of the Right Left Divide“, we made the case for understanding the difference between the left and right, as a difference in the lenses through which each side views the moral world: The left through the single lens of “Care/harm” and the right through a composite of “Care, Fairness and Liberty”. <
dude left: power crazed idiots who want utopia vs. right: make the gov't so small that power crazed idiots can't do much damage
“fairness” is a wish washy word that outside of sporting events and other games has no place in adult decision making.
jls is writing a book no one will read
Also, I don’t buy the premises that everyone thinks in terms of a moral bank account. It’s pretty much opposite of Christian dogma. I think people want to be seen as upright; I mean even murders in prison consider themselves morally superior to pedophiles, but that’s not the same thing.
> How the single lens and the multiple lens orientation manifest themselves in actual examples.<
a "lens" is a conduit for light. the left is a micro "lens" see – "microaggression" the right is a macro "lens" see -"you can't fuck with the electricity providers with stupid/costly regulation and have prosperity for all'
The Left’s lens is a funhouse mirror.
The problem with the Care/harm characterization of the left’s moral lens is that the lens itself, objectively speaking, is flawed. IF they Care as much as they claim to, why then do they do so much harm?
Maybe you should read some Thomas Sowell.
Anyway, good luck to you with the thesis/dissertation/habilitatsionsschriftmonograph.
the proggtarded have evil morals – might makes commie approved
see – pizza place indiana
I was holding this for use elsewhere, but as long as morality has popped up, and since it goes along with the subjective sentamentalism I mentioned earlier…
Back in 2013, sometime after the Supreme Court hear oral arguments in the DOMA case, the Very Reverend Robert Barron wrote the following:
[all emphases mine except After Virtue, ipso facto and bad, where bold substitutes for original italics]
It’s frightening stuff, but I really think the Age of Enlightenment is drawing to a close like the historical fall before dark ages winter. A brutal, bitter, killing winter.
It has been kinda cool seeing the apex of human creativity. The Tower of Babel ain’t got nothin’ on us.
the Age of Enlightenment drew to a close with the Terror
And since that suggests the topic of Sturm und Drang, the second section of this essay might be of interest to some.
Or not.
The tenth section might hold some interest for jls as well.
Here’s what I notice Ernst: that the word “justice”, outside use as a name for high court Judges, is not used in this thread. Jargon, instead appears in its place. Is that not odd? Well, maybe not so odd when justice is the very thing which has been lost, intentionally or otherwise.
I take exception to that. But it is almost a singular exception.
Good exception geoffb. And then the concept was examined comprehensively, in all its scope and depth.
Ernst – thanks for the reference.
Which part did you find interesting:
“Most intellectuals resemble Stiva, who first decides which camp to join and then makes sure to learn only the arguments on that side:”
or
“Stepan Arkadyievich took and read a liberal newspaper….And even though neither science nor art nor politics held any particular interest for him, he firmly maintained the same views on all these subjects that were maintained by the majority and by his newspaper, and he changed them only when the majority changed them, or, better put, he did not change them at all; they changed in him imperceptibly, of their own accord.”
If any interest, here’s my take on fairness
Fairness/cheating
Fairness / (violating a trust or failing to return a benefit)
Earlier we said that the Fairness/cheating foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of reaping the rewards of cooperation without being exploited. It makes us sensitive to indications that another person is likely to be a good (or bad) partner for collaboration and reciprocal altruism. It makes us want to shun or punish cheaters.
Cooperation at its simplest level is a process of working together for mutual benefit. This can take the form of joining forces to accomplish something bigger or performing a task for someone with the expectation that they will reciprocate in a “like manner” in the future. The question of whom and when to trust is at the center of this morality. Fairness is understood to be a “like exchange” of helping acts. Un-fairness or cheating results if one accepts the benefit but does not reciprocate or return the obligation.
The challenge for trust and cooperation is that the first provider must allow himself or herself to be vulnerable to exploitation by bearing the cost of providing the first benefit, without a guarantee that the cost will be reimbursed. It’s an important element for cooperation for this risk to be contained. Cheating is a violation of trust and requires a strong response. We have an innate understanding that when people do bad things in a cooperative relationship it is important that consequences flow from those actions in order to shape future actions.
A perfect example of this principle is a game of strategy called “Tit for tat”:
Tit for tat is an English saying meaning “equivalent retaliation”. It is also a highly effective strategy in game theory for the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. The strategy was first introduced by Anatol Rapoport in Robert Axelrod’s two tournaments, [1] held around 1980. Notably, it was (on both occasions) both the simplest strategy and the most successful. [2]
An agent using this strategy will first cooperate, and then subsequently replicate an opponent’s previous action. If the opponent previously was cooperative, the agent is cooperative. If not, the agent is not. This is similar to super rationality and reciprocal altruism in biology. – Wikipedia
It is instructive that since this simple strategy of “equivalent retaliation” consistently emerged as the winning strategy in a game of competition and cooperation, it perhaps represents a fundamental level of truth. Here, the threat of retaliation was a necessary ingredient for promoting a cooperative relationship. This outcome suggests that this same strategy could have emerged in a Darwinian competition of evolution and become imbedded in our moral makeup as well. In Tit for Tat they use the phrase “equivalent retaliation” which has a negative connotation but it could just as easily been described as “equivalent reciprocation” because the key idea is to strike a balance between that given and that which is taken. It is this balance, both positive and negative, that is the foundation for both fairness and cooperation.
In far eastern cultures, they have the concept of Karma where it is believed that for every “action” or “deed” there is an equal and morally commensurate reaction. Kindness, honesty and hard work will (eventually) bring good fortune; cruelty, deceit and laziness will (eventually) bring suffering. No divine intervention is required; it’s just a law of the universe, like gravity. With this cultural belief, “fairness” is embedded in the universe as a law of cause and effect and any imbalance that we create will be offset and rebalanced by a proportionate consequence.
In summary, fairness can be seen as a “like exchange” of helping acts or as a balance between that which is given and that which is taken. A proposition of “proportionality” where “equal” is merely a special case and has no special significance. Equal pay for equal work is a “fair” proposition. Equal pay for unequal work is an “unfair” proposition. In each case, we have equality, but in only the first do we have fairness. Any forced “equal outcome” nearly always embeds an injustice because the efforts of people and results are typically not equal. While fairness is a balancing act, and equality suggests balance, it is essential to bear in mind exactly what is to be balanced. If we choose to balance the wrong things, we not only create unfairness in the moment we also set a course for future unfairness and a degraded society.
And to add a little “justice”.
– Fairness –
“A Fair exchange is one in which both parties see beauty and each side then follows through to fulfill its terms”. -jls
In Greek mythology, Themis – as depicted above the Supreme Court – stands blindfolded, with a scale in one hand and a sword in the other as she watches over justice. The scale symbolizes the fundamental nature of fairness as a balance; the sword depicts the punitive aspect of justice; and the blindfold symbolizes the fair and equal administration of the law without bias, prejudice, or favor.
Just as Equality precludes Liberty, it also intrudes on fairness. Fairness at its core, demands equal treatment with an unbiased application of the rules, but in order to show care and control for a specific outcome, it is necessary to have unequal treatment with inconsistent rules. For liberals, the tendency is to see the outcome of a process – the ends – defining fairness, with the means serving as a tool to bring about that end. For the right, the means – or process – is where fairness is accomplished, with the end being a reflection of the process but not defining it.
As an example of a process/outcome, and how fairness relates, consider a poker game where the deck is shuffled, the cards are dealt and each hand is set. If the process is fair, meaning the rules have been followed and the dealing has been done without partiality or trickery, the outcome is fair by definition. It doesn’t matter if one person gets four aces and another gets none; the process defines the fairness of the transaction, not the result.
If on the other hand, you are inclined to see fairness in the result – or outcome – of a process, you must start by knowing the answer before the question is asked: Or in this case before the dealing is done. If your mindset is that all participants should get an equal number of aces in order for the process to be fair, it severely limits the range of processes that qualify. In this case, it requires a stacked deck and something other than a random shuffle as a starting point – the antithesis of fairness.
Our thesis is that the process defines fairness – as a point of logical necessity – but the thesis leaves open the question of why liberals tend to see fairness as an outcome in spite of this illogic. The obvious answer is that care is defined by the outcome and liberals have an elevated Care center so they gravitate towards their preferred morality. The less obvious explanation is that they have a moral foundation grounded in the “family group” as their social model and they tend to extrapolate that moral foundation into the larger society: A micro to macro extrapolation.
Distributive justice
One way to understand the dichotomy between process and result is to look at the difference between in-group and inter-group morality. Within a family group, comprised of people with different abilities and needs, it is important that each member have their needs met, independent of contribution: An infant contributes little, for example, but meeting their needs is still important for long-term success. Within the group, the concept of fairness is barely distinguishable from the concept of care. In fact, within a family the lack of care is considered unfair, since the rules of “family” require that all be taken care of equally.
Here, the dominant perspective of fairness is seen as “distributive fairness” where the important idea is how benefits and burdens are distributed among the members: Are the needs of each being met? Are rewards geared to promoting productive behavior? Are the burdens being shared in an equitable fashion? Within a family, it’s not important who brings the benefit to the group because ownership is jointly held and all share in the benefit. Distributive fairness is concerned with results – not process – with procedures being readily adjusted to achieve whatever end is deemed appropriate at the time. If the “rules” in force at any one time, don’t meet the desires of the parents, they can be easily changed with a final “because I said so” declarative.
Fairness constantly changes as the children grow and develop. To the question: “Why does Janie get to stay up until 11 but I have to go to bed at 9”. The answer is “Because she is 12 yrs. old and you are only 8. When you are 12, you will get to stay up later, assuming you are “good”. Children are constantly trying to determine the rules of fairness, but since fairness is contingent on development, there is no set formulation.
Distributive fairness is about handing out objects of value, whether material objects – like cookies or cash – or metaphysical objects like having a say about where to go on vacation. It’s the equivalent of handing out cookies – or gifts – to a group of kids: The owner is free to hand out cookies in any fashion they choose with the proviso that they construct a rationale to justify the division. “Johnny gets two cookies because he ate all his supper”. Or “Johnny only gets one cookie because he ate all his supper.” Distributive fairness is simply about constructing a rationale to support the “end” the parents deem appropriate at the time. The primary moral center that governs the distribution is Care.
The model here is of a central authority – the parents – having ownership and control over all resources and keeping track of who deserves what by personal observation. They then give or withhold benefits and burdens, based on their judgment, of care needs and balance. Within this construct, there is little regard for the risks associated with cooperative behavior, because the parents control outcomes, and any cheating is corrected directly by central authority. It’s a model we’re all familiar with, in one form or another, and it works well within a closed circle built for a parent/child relationship, but as we all know it does not scale well.
The primary requirement for “distributive fairness” is limited freedom and constrained options. In a family unit with dictatorial control, fairness is whatever the parent says it is, but as children develop into adults, demand grows for a more consistent set of rules with a greater emphasis on equity. Likewise, as we consider larger organizational structures, freedom assumes an ever-growing role.
Fairness and voluntary exchange
Inter-group, family-to-family, or adult-to-adult cooperation requires a more complete understanding. In the family group, cooperation is commanded by the central authority backed by corporal punishment, but in a free and open society, cooperation must be induced through mutual benefit with minimum risk. Fairness – and justice – defines the qualities of the process that leads to that reduced risk. Fairness sets the terms and justice insures the follow-through.
In contrast to “Distributive fairness”, where ownership is jointly held, inter-group exchange involves the transfer of ownership between groups. Here fairness and ownership are integrally linked because ultimately we can only exchange that which we own. Reduced to essentials, each of us enters the world having only two things to exchange, time and freedom. Time can be directly exchanged as wages or indirectly as material objects, which are products of our time. Freedom can be exchanged, by agreeing to restrictions on what we are allowed to do, for a like restriction on others. An example is voting, where we agree to cast a single vote, on condition others agree to the same restriction.
In a fair exchange, each side sees beauty – meaning, each side places a greater value on what is received than what is given – and each side holds themselves accountable for following through on the terms. Freedom insures a fair exchange by allowing each side to walk away if the deal is not to their liking. In the abstract, fairness can be defined as an equitable exchange of like value, where there is a balance between give and take, with each side seeing value through their own circumstances and preferences.
From this, we see that fairness can take many forms and outcomes but there is a common thread that runs through a fair exchange that separates it from the alternative:
• The freedom to judge value and engage as an act of free will
• Follow through on the agreement while applying the rules in an unbiased fashion.
This is another way of saying, a Fair exchange is one where both parties see beauty and each side follows through to fulfill its terms. The foundation is built on freedom, beauty and accountability.
Heh.
Which part did you find interesting[?]
This:
(Stiva is Stepan Arkadyievich’s nickname, btw)
I thought it was interesting because it illustrates why I think you’re going to have to address dissimulation and self-deception if you’re going to avoid excessive abstraction.
Very astute Mr. Ernst Schreiber.
Not sure i can avoid excess abstraction but i do have a pretty good theory of why liberal but not conservatives engage in dissimulation and self-deception.
If you think of morality as serving as a counterbalance to our base instincts, then it’s easy to see how the urge to protect the weak and dependent, is a necessary counter to our fundamental drive for self preservation or self-interest. For example, if self-interest was allowed to dominate, the species would suffer from lack of care for infants and dependent mothers. The moral center of Care/harm provides the necessary balance.
If Care/harm is your single moral center – as I contend of the left – then your moral universe is reduced to the immorality of self-interest on one side vs. the morality of other-interests on the other. To be a “good” person means giving of yourself while expecting nothing tangible in return. What is gained by a caring act is a moral credit or a license for a self indulgence.
Given this moral architecture, the left is incentivized to provide a string of caring acts, where each one adds to their moral balance and brings self righteousness. Notice, there is no requirement that the caring acts result in actual improvement or that they lead to resolving the issues of the needy. In fact, resolving the issue works against motivation of the left because it removes the opportunity for righteousness.
This shouldn’t be taken to mean that liberals don’t really care about the needy – they really do care – it just means they care about being a “good” person more.
>For example, if self-interest was allowed to dominate, the species would suffer from lack of care for infants and dependent mothers. <
nyt: world ends; minorities and women hit hardest.
>This shouldn’t be taken to mean that liberals don’t really care about the needy – they really do care – it just means they care about being a “good” person more. <
i think that's called narcissism
>For example, if self-interest was allowed to dominate, the species would suffer from lack of care for infants and dependent mothers. <
There you go again, confusing selfishness with self interest.
It's in people's self interest to "care" about the society they live in. Ya big dope.
Sure, I mean, you might decide to eat one of your own children – they’re just sitting around the house, and they do look like they’d be tasty – but you just know it’ll put the wife in a foul mood for lord knows how long. And who needs that?
Long Term: it’s easier and more pleasant to just order a pizza.
jls–
I’m curious to know what your field of expertise is, and also about your training.
And I don’t know if this tosses a monkey wrench into your schema or not, but have you considered that people whose morality comes from an external authority tend to be conservative, whereas people who see morality as something intrinsic to themselves tend to fall on the liberal-socialist side? Certainly this would explain why it’s so important to liberals to be seen as compassionate.
Because I’m understanding you to be saying that one’s politics shapes one’s morality rather than vice versa. But maybe that’s an error on my part.
On the other hand, self interest is, in point of fact, allowed to dominate.
e.g. wicked, evil, profligate, ernst, charming seducer of ingenuous debutantes doesn’t really have to man up and support that poor girl he got “in a family way.” After all, it’s her choice. And if she doesn’t want the lil’ parasite vacuumed out her womb, well, that what WIC is for, right? To make sure that mothers with infants are provided for?
Certainly that’s a better deal for wicked, evil, profligate ernst than having to choose between a trip to the altar or a load of buckshot in the ass for daring to spoil with some rightfully outraged father’s darling little princess….
If Care/harm is your single moral center – as I contend of the left – then your moral universe is reduced to the immorality of self-interest on one side vs. the morality of other-interests on the other. To be a “good” person means giving of yourself while expecting nothing tangible in return. What is gained by a caring act is a moral credit or a license for a self indulgence.
that may be what some people do but it is not what the left does at all.
please show me a person who acts from a leftist ideology that gives of himself without expecting something in return.
if self-interest was allowed to dominate, the species would suffer from lack of care for infants and dependent mothers.
because it is never in one’s self-interest to protect and care for the family one loves more than his/herself
Yes, there are people who are emotionally incapable of bonding through love,
we call them crippled.
Finally, I suspect jls’s Care/harm liberal moralists (if inded there is such a creature) is busy tying his or herself in knots over whose action harm Darling Little Princess more wicked evil profligate ernst for knocking her up in the process of helping her “discover her sexuality” or Darling Princess’s clearly oppressive patriarchal rightfully outraged father for even attempting to limit her autonomous opportunities for “persoanl growth” by keeping guys like wicked evil profligate ernst away from her in the first place.
–to say nothing of expecting that cad to do someting so old fashioned as to marry her!
proggtarded
>If Care/harm is your single moral center – as I contend of the left – then your moral universe is reduced to the immorality of self-interest on one side vs. the morality of other-interests on the other. To be a “good” person means giving of yourself while expecting nothing tangible in return. What is gained by a caring act is a moral credit or a license for a self indulgence. <
The Clash – Clampdown
Ernst
the biggest difference I see between left/conservative “morality” is on their basic approach to humanity
the left feels people are not responsible for themselves and whatever “bad luck” befalls them is because of “Circumstances” created by “Other People.” Therefore, the most power must take charge to make “things fair” for the general populace regardless of any harm or usurpation of rights that fall to particular individuals. It is better to have everyone slightly poor, to be “fair”, than to ALLOW by law, some individuals to succeed.
conservatives know that people are not basically good and that most of everyone’s fate is in their own hands. they want to give individuals the most freedom possible to succeed or fail on their own merit. They lean to giving a road map, but only want law to restrict when behavior harms other.
proggtarded newrouter, or a description of proggtarded thinking?
because “what is gained by a [ostensibly would be the qualifier I would use] caring act is a moral credit or a license for a self indulgence. [my emph.]
That to me sounds like a not unreasonable description of “cheap grace,” which is not unheard of around here as a short hand for liberal self-congratulation on what wonderful people they are.
the definition is the problem:
>>If Care/harm is your single moral center<
eff this clown. who's "caring"?/who's "harming". bs no nutting that be WHO
To use a Orwellian metaphor, that’s Outer Party thinking Darleen. The Inner Party tells the outer party and the proles that to keep them in their place, so to speak. The Inner Party consists of Nietzschean Uebermenchen who make up their own morality, which is of course moral becaue it’s theirs.
G. K. Chesteron suggested (paraphrasing, of course) that this was the definition of insanity.
And if you think about it, he’s right. From that point of view, the most moral persona on the planet is the one who is the most sociopathic. Because he is ontologically certain that everything he does is in the right simply beacuse he is the one doing it.
So what your average run of the mill leftist symp (aka Democrat voter) is doing is reserving to his or her self the right to pick and choose what’s really moral and what is merely morally neutral (despite what the authorities say) from the extrinsic source of morality, i.e. religion.
I could give you a long quote, but the essay to read is Christopher Dawson’s “Civilization and Morals” from 1925; reprinted in Dynamics of World History
As to whether or not people are basicallly good or not, I’ve come around to the postion that people are basically good, but the consequences of Original Sin make it extremely difficult to act on that basic goodness.
But then I’m a recovering Calvinist who used to take Hobbes’s description of the state of nature as near Gospel because the whole world and everything in it was well and thouroughly screwed thanks to Us.
Instead of dismissing him as a clown, maybe we could try to help jls with his definition?
That’s also getting into that area of the Moral Imagination versus the Social Imagination that Trilling was talking about and the Knox Beran used to such great effect.. Sowell too. Repeatedly (seriously so).
>Instead of dismissing him as a clown, maybe we could try to help jls with his definition? <
his manifesto : too long winded . boring.
Ernst – you do have it reversed in describing the relationship between moral and political philosophy.
My thesis in a nut shell:
Prime directive of life: Self preservation and Self replication – avoid pain/pursue pleasure
Moral imperatives to moderate the prime directives: Care/harm – Fairness/cheating – Liberty/oppression
Ethical mindset flowing from the moral architecture:
Left >> Single lens – Care/harm >> Ends justify the means >> Situational ethics
Right >> Multiple lens >> Means justify the ends >> Rule based ethics
World view and political ideology flows from the ethical mindset:
Left >> Strong vs. weak >> “Goodness” is defined as using force to constrain the strong for the benefit of the weak… aka Care. Victim-oppressor-champion worldview.
Right >> Free exchange >> “Goodness” defined as staying within the rules – do no harm, don’t cheat or steal, respect the rights of others. Free Enterprise worldview
Looks like you’ve got the Hobbean mode alright jls: materialist hedonism, in brief. Now, is there an alternative? Or is the one mode the sole mode?
We recall: it was Hobbes’ self-propelled mission to expel what had been a roughly one thousand year long reigning Aristotelian moral basis in politics, to replace that with the modern project, initiated by Machiavelli (see Prince, 15.)
Success. Eventually. Very good. Or, possibly not so good, if what is important has gone missing. Does the empiricist . . . care? How does he know what is important, supposing he does not return to examine the alternatives, but only waves them all away with his hand?
As an example of the implication of the moral foundation theory contrast with Sowell:
The Unconstrained Vision[edit]
Sowell argues that the unconstrained vision relies heavily on the belief that human nature is essentially good. Those with an unconstrained vision distrust decentralized processes and are impatient with large institutions and systemic processes that constrain human action. They believe there is an ideal solution to every problem, and that compromise is never acceptable. Collateral damage is merely the price of moving forward on the road to perfection. Sowell often refers to them as “the self anointed.” Ultimately they believe that man is morally perfectible. Because of this, they believe that there exist some people who are further along the path of moral development, have overcome self-interest and are immune to the influence of power and therefore can act as surrogate decision-makers for the rest of society.
The Constrained Vision[edit]
Sowell argues that the constrained vision relies heavily on belief that human nature is essentially unchanging and that man is naturally inherently self-interested, regardless of the best intentions. Those with a constrained vision prefer the systematic processes of the rule of law and experience of tradition. Compromise is essential because there are no ideal solutions, only trade-offs. Those with a constrained vision favor solid empirical evidence and time-tested structures and processes over intervention and personal experience. Ultimately, the constrained vision demands checks and balances and refuses to accept that all people could put aside their innate self-interest.[3] Wikapedia
Moral foundation theory:
Holds, that the reason behind the Unconstrained vision, is the single lens moral architecture. It holds Care as the dominant moral center and recast Fairness and Liberty as subordinate: An example would be the cake baker who refused to bake a cake for the gay wedding – the need to care for the disadvantaged gay couple justifies the violation of the bakers liberty. From the left’s perspective there is no violation because liberty is recast as the freedom to use force in service to the victim class.
The Constrained vision of the right is limited by the need to balance all three moralities. Ethical acts are those which satisfy all three simultaneously and all “solutions” are seen as tradeoffs between competing imperatives. From the right, the cake baker dilemma would be “resolved” by allowing the gay couple to buy a cake but not requiring the baker to participate in their wedding ceremony. From the rights perspective Liberty is the freedom from compulsion and the Care imperative doesn’t justify a violation.
“Ultimately, the constrained vision demands checks and balances and refuses to accept that all people could put aside their innate self-interest.”
I don’t only think all people couldnt put aside innate self interest, I don’t think ANYONE does, nor should they. We are created with self preservation baked in.
Plus, the golden rule doesn’t work real well without it.
If Fairness limits the means you use to advance your self interest and respect for the Liberty of others sets the bounds for your own exercise of liberty then pursuing self interest is moral.
If Fairness is defined in terms of the “ends” – with no limit on means – and Liberty is the freedom to compel others then self-interest is immoral and must be recast as other-interest.
And if up is down and black is white you’re down the rabbit hole discussing philosophy with Humpty Dumptu.
Hope everyone had an enjoyable weekend. Me? Too much driving, not enough imbibing. But the kinder had fun with their cousins, so there’s that.
I need to read the rest of jls’s comments, but I think I see a problem right at the beginning of the first one:
The question you’ve begged is the source of this “Prime Directive.” Is it Intrinsic or Extrinsic? e.g., does it come from God or the gods? Epicurus? Is it something hardwired into our genetic programming?
i.e., is it revealed, discovered, or inate?
I see the prime directives a fundamental to all life – intrinsic, comes from God (or evolution if you prefer), softwired into our genetic code, and innate.
THE ROOTS OF NATURAL MORALITY – PRIME DIRECTIVES – ARE
Self-interest… propagate the species… pursue pleasure and avoid pain.
The thesis presented here is that the moral centers of Care, Fairness and Liberty evolved as a counterforce to the primitive nature of man, and as a solution to the challenges posed by their biology. The idea is that if humans had only their primitive nature alone, without a contemporizing force, the species could not survive. For example, if each individual were to pursue their selfish-interest without consideration for the weak and dependent, newborn infants could not survive and dependent mothers could not care for their babies.
The reason we say “roots of natural morality” is that in order to understand the innate nature of our moral character, it’s necessary to understand the roots or causes that bring about the necessity for the morality to begin with. Every successful life form shares at least three features:
• The drive to take care of oneself and stay alive
• The need to find sexual partners for reproduction
• The desire to spread or propagate the species
In lower level animals with a very limited moral capability, these primitive drives are sufficient to meet their needs. In these cases at the “lizard brain” stage of development, these basic drives, modulated by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, are all that’s required. However, as we move up the evolutionary chain the requirements get more diverse and complex.
Man, at what we think of as the top of the development ladder has a much more complex set of needs. For example, the human brain is so large compared to their body size that humans have to give birth a year before the infant can walk just to allow room for the baby’s head to pass through the birth canal. This early birth and the subsequent long period of care the infant requires, drives the need for a morality of care, which serves as a counter force to self-interest.
Here’s how i understand “innate”:
The proposition is these mores came about as a necessity from an evolutionary standpoint but have been developed and extended by training and tradition. These six (Care, Fairness, Liberty, Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity) are believed to be innate to the species. For a working definition of “innate”, Haidt offers us the view of neuroscientist Gary Marcus when he explains:
“Nature bestows upon the newborn a considerably complex brain, but one that is best seen as prewired— flexible and subject to change— rather than hardwired, fixed, and immutable.” – Marcus
To replace wiring diagrams, Marcus suggests a better analogy:
The brain is like a book, the first draft of which is written by the genes during fetal development. No chapters are complete at birth, and some are just rough outlines waiting to be filled in during childhood. But not a single chapter— be it on sexuality, language, food preferences, or morality— consists of blank pages on which a society can inscribe any conceivable set of words. -Marcus
Marcus’s analogy leads to this definition of innateness: Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.… “Built-in” does not mean unmalleable; it means “organized in advance of experience.” Whether this organization came about through a process of evolutionary selection or was part of man’s original genetic structure is open to question but for our purpose it doesn’t matter. It only matters that as of today it is so.
An example of our neuro plasticity or malleability was demonstrated by an experiment, where people were fitted with a special pair of goggles, which inverted their picture of the world. Up became down and vice versa. After a few moments of disorientation it was amazing how people could adapt to the inverted world. After a day they were able to reorient and function essentially unchanged. This illustrates the malleability of the basic structure within the brain. Even though we come equipped with a processing capability to construct and understand the world as we find it. We are not limited to this particular world and could have adapted differently if required.
Further to my previous comment:
The same problem applies to the “Moral imperatives.” Who or what is the architect behind the “moral architecture?”
Also, and while I need to go back and reread Sowell to be sure, what I suspect is that you’ve “edited” Sowell so much so that it’s not Sowell, it’s you. Maybe that’s Wikipedia’s fault,
You’re not one of those evolutionary psychologist sorts are you? (he asked mock suspiciously).
Because you’re mixing languages (language of religion/morality and language of science) That’s bound to create all sorts of confusion for everybody unless and until you can keep it distinct in your head in order to communicate it clearly to your audience. –Offered as a neutral observation, not a criticism of methodological approach.
Sorry for the in and out “drive-by comments.” I’m really too busy today and probably the next couple of days to do more than check in and see if the converstaion is still ongoing. I’ll try to say something more complete later tonight if I’m able.
It’s a capuchin process Ernst, only not of the O.F.M.Cap sort. (wink)
The Sowell quote is from “A Conflict of Visions” via Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Conflict_of_Visions
As to the “who or what” is behind the “Moral Architecture” the simple answer is God or evolution but I am not sure it matters which – assuming there is even a difference between the two.
What I hope to communicate, is that the three moral centers of Care/Fairness /Liberty are fundamental to our species and have an intrinsic meaning, derived from the purpose they serve. We don’t have to learn about not eating our young – nor does a cat or a dog – it’s built in as a moral sentiment. We just know it’s wrong – no religious training necessary. For more on moral foundations see – The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion:
http://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion-ebook/dp/B0052FF7YM/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1436220082&sr=1-1&keywords=haidt
The reason it is important to ground the meaning of our natural morality in “purpose” is that purpose gives direction and lets us see right from wrong. If meaning becomes decoupled from purpose (or intent) then language becomes simply a series of malleable symbols easily re-purposed.
This idea is particularly important when trying to understand how the left and right differ. Some would say they differ because they each have a different definition of Fairness, as if fairness were a semantic construct, decoupled from the innate nature of humans. In order to deal with this question we have to derive the meaning from the purpose served. Here is a little more complete description of the three I focus on.
• The Care/harm foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of caring for vulnerable children. It makes us sensitive to signs of suffering and need; it makes us despise cruelty and want to care for those who are weak or suffering.
• The Fairness/cheating foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of reaping the rewards of cooperation without being exploited. It makes us sensitive to indications that another person is likely to be a good (or bad) partner for collaboration and reciprocal altruism. It makes us want to shun or punish cheaters.
• The Liberty/oppression foundation is the basis for the drive to separate from the protection of the family group. It makes us sensitive to dependency and gives us the urge to become a self-sovereign individual. It makes us push back against control or any convention that limits our freedom.
Thanks Sdferr – the capuchin demonstration is a nice addition to my reference library.
Another drive-by type comment for jls:
I think ends justify the means (Left) / means justify the ends (Right) is a false dichotomy created by Machiavelli’s bit of sophistry. Ends justify the means thinking is almost certainly a real thing, but I don’t think anyone, except perhaps the proverbial carpenter who only owns hammer and thus sees all the problems in the world as nails, thinks the means justify the ends.
Ends are ends and means are means. Obviously there’s some kind of relationship between them based on effectiveness and proportionality; e.g. if your end is to eliminate ISIS, the occassional drone strike on low ranking jihadis isn’t going to be very effective; similarly curing cancer by euthanising anyone diagnosed with cancer isn’t proportional –and probably ineffective as well.
I also think Fairness is a poor substitute for Justice, which can be defined as giving each person what he or she is due. In inegalitarian societies, this means deference to superiors and indifference to inferiors -treating equals equally and inequals unequally is how Aristotle (I think) formulated it.
It may not be a strict justice to Machiavelli to account his proposal as mere sophism. After all, it’s his world and we’re only living in it. So credit where credit is due. Better, perhaps, to reexamine his project in order to put what is foremost in its proper place: politics is an endeavor of mistake, of error, of misidentification, of betrayal, and so on (see the Corgi), such that Machiavelli’s insistence that we face these facts and build upon them for the sake of stability (of all things!) in our governance — which he knows is not our philosophical enterprise, another thing altogether — ought to be to his credit and not to befouling his good name.
jls
Ok, I haven’t been following along but what is this “natural morality” you speak of?
The Care/harm foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of caring for vulnerable children.
Whose children, under what circumstances? In Roman times newborn infants, were abandoned and exposed to die because of convenience. It was Jews, then Christians who eventually brought this to an end.
It was RATIONAL for Romans to get rid of undesirable infants this way (and an easy way for other families to pick up slaves by picking up some of these vulnerable children).
The morality of starting from the assumption that all humans are created equal, king or peasant, therefore all life is precious is a religious one, not “natural”.
Ex. 32: 26 — Then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, Who is on the Lord’s side? let him come unto me. And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him.
27 And he said unto them, Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour.
28 And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses: and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.
I appreciate the “drive-by” comment, Ernst. Without the feedback, I wouldn’t have thought the expression “means justify ends” carried a question. It’s just another way of expressing “rule based” morality.
What I mean, is if the procedure leading to an “end” – or outcome – is judged fair, then the outcome itself is judged fair: thus a fair “means” defines a fair “end”. Social psychologist refer to this as the “fair process effect” which they describe as the willingness for people to accept even negative outcomes if the process is seen as fair.
If Roberts had used standard statutory interpretation for the ACA (aka a fair means), the outcome would have been judged fair, even though disruptive.
If the shuffling and dealing are done by a fair process the resulting poker hand is deemed fair, independent of the resulting hand.
As to fairness and justice… I see them as closely related but not interchangeable. Earlier I posted this:
Justice to my way of thinking is the accountability side of fairness. To insure fairness – meaning that each side follows through on the terms of the deal – there must be an accounting and consequences aimed at balancing the scales. If cheating occurs, justice looks to reverse the ill-gotten gain and bring a corrective to discourage future cheating.
Darleen – here are the antecedent links if you want to join in.
https://proteinwisdom.com/?p=57159#comment-1254518
https://proteinwisdom.com/?p=57159#comment-1254519
https://proteinwisdom.com/?p=57159#comment-1254558
Here’s a clip from one of the links:
Also take a look at this – courtesy of sdferr: https://proteinwisdom.com/?p=57159#comment-1254552
We don’t have to learn about not eating our young
depends on how you define both “we” and “our young.”
see: child sacrifice
also: Lion prides — the new dominate male lion WILL kill the cubs of the old male lion
animal morality is about survival of the pack, not species. Ditto humans.
Getting beyond pack/tribe is a matter of civilization which is neither innate or “natural.”
Is Evil rational?
By “we” i mean we humans and the “our young” follows.
Are you just being argumentative or do your truly believe that humans come from the factory as a blank slate and must be taught such things as “do not eat the young”? I accept there are exceptions but i am talking factory standard issue here.
F & S
Darlene –
“The morality of starting from the assumption that all humans are created equal, king or peasant, therefore all life is precious is a religious one, not “natural.”
I agree. So, what puzzles me is why you think I think otherwise. I am not saying that “natural morality” is a product of rationality or that it involves a set of starting assumptions. Natural morality is like intentionalism – it just is. It comes to us as an emotional reaction to a set of circumstances.
The best illustration I can think of at the moment is sdferr’s capuchin monkeys. Obviously, the monkey wasn’t thinking about John Rawls or the teaching of the Bible. He was reacting to the situation. All I am asking is to accept what we see in the video as natural “Fairness” and then take the next step to add Care and Liberty.
Care morality- simply means the capuchin will look after their young.
Liberty morality- simply means he would rather not to be locked in that cage.
And it’s natural or innate.
Ernst –
Extending the comment about “Means and Ends”, I want to put those ideas in the context of “Moral architecture”. So far we have discussed the elements of natural moral centers – Care/Fairness/Liberty – but not said much about how those elements work together or how each side prioritizes the interaction. It’s these interactions that distinguishes the left from the right.
A “Means justifies the Ends” ethical mindset suggests the ascendant moral imperative is Fairness with Care subordinate. The example above is Roberts ruling against the ACA – if he had – based on following the rules of statutory interpretation, and allowing the chips to fall where they may, relative to needy insurance seekers. The underlying belief is that if we act in an ethical manner, respecting Fairness and Liberty, the overall result will be a successful society. Reduced to essentials, it also means that following the Fair course justifies doing harm – at least in the short run.
An “Ends justifies the Means” mindset, flips the moral relationships placing Care at the dominate center, with Fairness/Liberty assuming the lesser role. The underlying belief is that if we act with Care for the needy, where those with less are given more and vice versa, the overall society gains virtue. Reduced to essentials this mindset means that following the Caring course, justifies cheating and oppression – at least in the short run.
Virtue. (snort)
What about virtu?
do your truly believe that humans come from the factory as a blank slate and must be taught such things as “do not eat the young”?
I’m truly trying not to be argumentative, buy yes, our nurture far outstrips our nature.
The act of good parenting involves civilizing the tiny savages we call children.
Children are NOT naturally “good” “bad” .. they are neutral. All they know is basic bodily urges – hunger, pain, pleasure. And as human beings, infants NEED more than just satisfying those physical needs.
See “failure to thrive” syndrome.
Human success has come with experimentation on what works. Morality is not innate.
You can take a kitten from it’s mother, never let it see or interact with other cats and it will still behave as a cat.
Morality is not innate in humans. It is something we discover along the way to moving beyond mere survival.
This “virtue” goes more to Equality than pride, bravery, strength or ruthlessness. Perhaps a little civic humanism?
I agree with most of what you say so perhaps the problem is definitional. If you were to think of “morality” as a compass that indicates the right or wrong direction for survival is it possible for the basic direction to be built in? To be sure i am not talking all morality – just a core set that appears fundamental.
If you disagree how do you account for the following video?
jls
per the video … does it really suggest morality? Or that the monkey, upon seeing a more desirable piece of fruit, wanted that?
I’d like to see all manner of the experiment before commenting.
I WILL say, as I raised 4 children, that within a family they do keep an eye on what is on each others plate at dessert time. We had the A cuts, B chooses rule.
But you have less of that kind of “equality policing” when outside of the family group and other factors come into play.
No adult complains that it is “unfair” that a doctor received more in compensation for his/her labor than a housekeeper.
(the Left is notoriously “not adult”)
It may help to dwell upon Achilles’ anger Darleen — his rising thumos, his manly spiritedness (oops, there’s that vir again). He wants justice. He is enraged that he doesn’t receive it. Where oh where does this come from, we wonder? It comes from his inner monkey.
Or, if you prefer the Jews’ story to the Greeks’, take King David:
*** 2 Sam., 12, 5: And David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man; and he said to Nathan, As the Lord liveth, the man that hath done this thing shall surely die:
6 And he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no
pity
falafels?
This thread reminds me of Joey’s “giving, and loving, and caring” speech, full of sound and
furyfurry…Darleen –
The monkey behavior suggests to me a foundation for morality – a common origin – if not the final product.
Why it is meaningful to my thesis, is that i am looking for the common moral starting point, with the goal of discovering how and why the two sides diverge. Whether Care/Fairness/Liberty are innate or developed isn’t critical but it is important to understand that both left and right start with the same moral tools.
BTW earlier you said:
I express a similar idea by what i call the victim-oppressor-champion triad. It’s a world-view that sees the strong pitted against the weak and the role of the champion is to fight for the weak. The underlaying belief is that all material differences in society are attributable to the oppression of the weak by the strong. Rather than “bad luck” being the cause of the “circumstances” it’s a willful act of oppression and how the strong got to be strong – on the backs of the poor. From my perspective this triad is fundamental to the lefts world-view and it has the effect of shaping – and even inverting – the lefts moral architecture.
Does this sound right to you?
Are certain inborn, instinctual behaviors naturally, inately moral or are we ascribing morality to certain natural (inborn, instinctual) behaviors –behaviors which may be the beginnings of morality as such?
Follow-up, when we talk about such behaviors in animals, how do we know we’re not anthropomorphising?
June 20th came and went, the sixth anniversary of the public slaying of Neda Agha-Soltan by a Basij gangster — the strong champion of the weak, PresidentIVotePresentAndWonPenPhone said not a word, neither when Neda was murdered nor on the occasion of the sixth anniversary of that murder — but then, he was busy seeing to it that the Basijs’ masters will have nuclear weapons before the year is out. Such are the trials of those who would see justice done to the United States of America for its crimes against mankind.
Follow-up, when we talk about such behaviors in animals, how do we know we’re not anthropomorphising?
Nowadays men run whole genomes through sequencers, say for instance a chimpanzee and a human microcephalic and an ordinary human being, then compare the outputs one to another. Where are the similarities, where the differences? How come the one species has a big forebrain and the other a small? How come the microcephalic human resembles the chimp on the exterior? What’s going on with the machinery inside? That sort of thing.
“The monkey behavior suggests to me a foundation for morality – a common origin – if not the final product. ”
Suggests to me envy, an egocentric common origin of anger.
Isn’t what you are trying to dress up pretty what most people call a conscience? If so, yes, people are created with the capacity for a conscience, but how an individual’s conscience develops is instilled by the circumstances they grew up in.
Ernst –
My answer to the first part is above in response to Darlene.
As to the second part, I think we are anthropomorphizing when we ascribe “fairness” as the motivator of the cucumber throwing monkey. That thought may make us cautions but it doesn’t make us wrong. If you watched the video you see the monkey reacting as if he had a sense of fairness, that doesn’t prove it’s true, but it provides evidence to support the hypothesis.
Further, why should we resist the idea that monkeys have a sense of right and wrong built on a basic moral foundation. They may not understand the construct of liberty but they surely know they want to be free. They may not know why they cherish their young but they surely do. And if you try to short them, in a fair exchange, they apparently know the difference between a cucumber and a grape.
Suggests to me envy, an egocentric common origin of anger.
Can you think of an experimental design that would distinguish envy from fairness?
How about if they trained the capuchin to exchange one rock for a cucumber and two rocks for a grape. Would that provide for a distinction?
The problem with fairness: I’m stronger/more aggressive/genetically more appealing to the opposite sex, therefore I deserve the tastier fruit/ the better portion/to breed the females, said the one capuchin to the other in a blatant case of fairy tale anthropomorphising.
So, no, I can’t think of an expirment that would distinguish envy from fairness because what is fair? Any definition runs the risk of tautology it seems to me.
That said, I think you can make the case that certain social animals have some limited awareness of how they’re treated by/relate to other animals in the tribe/pack/herd(–?– not sure about herd animals) but now we’re into heirarchies of dominance and submission –or so it seems to me.
One might wish to look at the unfairness hissy-fit among the monkeys in their “natural condition” outside the lab where the effects of the protest are viewed contextually. “What results there, what comes about as a result of the hissy-fit?”, is the empirical question. Thus we are “let in” on the meaning of the tautology we expect, that is, deducing from the broader modern Darwinian synthesis. Does the monkey with the food advantage cede some portion of food in appeasement to the protestor? Does a fight ensue? Does the ladies watch and learn? What are the specific ranks of these individual monkeys in their social hierarchy when a fight begins? How do these ranks affect the outcome? Are new rankings the outcome? And so on. The mere fact of the lab monkey’s protest doesn’t tell us much about the genesis of that fact condition.
However, says J.J. Rousseau (speaking of men) to the Academy of Dijon in his Second discourse: “It would be no more reasonable to believe that at first peoples threw themselves into the arms of an absolute master without conditions and for all time, and that the first means of providing for the common security imagined by proud and unconquered men was to rush into slavery. In fact, why did they give themselves superiors if not to defend themselves against oppression, and to protect their goods, their freedoms, and their lives, which are, so to speak, the constituent elements of their being? Now in relations between one man and another, as the worst that can happen to one is to see himself at the discretion of the other, would it not have been contrary to good sense to being by surrendering into the hands of a chief the only things they needed his help to preserve? What equivalent could he have offered them for the concession of so fine a right? And had he dared to require it under pretext of defending them, would he not promptly have received the answer of allegory: What more will the enemy do to us? It is therefore incontestable, and it is the fundamental maxim of all political right, that peoples have given themselves chiefs to defend their freedom and not to enslave themselves. If we have a prince, said Pliny to Trajan, it is so that he may preserve us from having a master.“
Like saying “the problem with fairness is that it doesn’t protect the weak from the strong or require respect for liberty”. Of course that’s true but fairness is only one of three moral centers.The role of fairness is to promote cooperation.
Your fairy tale is a good illustration of what happens when one moral center is allowed to dominate and define the other three. This is what i contend has happened with the left. They have elevated Care to the point that Fairness is defined as providing an “equal outcome” (aka Care), and Liberty is understood as the freedom to compel other to proved care for the weak.
To clarify the construct of fairness, do you believe it is possible to define a “fair exchange” in a free environment without risk of tautology?
Fair exchange in a fee environment is as subjective as “fair”. As long as both sides are satisfied with the exchange it is fair.
To clarify my last question.
As you may have gathered by now i see the three moral centers as poles in a tent holding up morality. When all three are present each pole has a clear and distinct meaning, but if one or more is absent, it has the effect of distorting the others. What i saw you doing with the fairytale scenario was trying to define fairness – I deserve – in a context without Care or Liberty.We can do this, but it should be done with the proviso, that it only has meaning within an hierarchical/anarchical society and doesn’t say much about the meaning in a moral society.
My question about “free exchange” is meant to bring out the meaning of fairness in a free and open society where Care and Liberty are present. The context here is a cooperative arrangement between free and equal people so that Care and Liberty are not factors. My contention is that in a moral society (Care/Fairness/Liberty all present) Fairness is rather straight forward.
The complexity for fairness comes if the society doesn’t have liberty. In a free society each person is free to walk away from a deal, but when a central authority calls the shots, fairness becomes rather arbitrary. It’s like handing out cookies to children. If i have three cookies and three children i can give one to each “because they are all precious” or i could give two to little ernst “because he ate all his dinner” or perhaps no cookies for ernst “BECAUSE he ate ALL his dinner”. The point is that in an authoritative society “fairness” is more about constructing a rationale to explain an outcome than in determining an outcome. This is why you see the left so concerned about “distributive fairness” or “income inequality” – they think they are handing out cookies to children.
LBascom – I agree… here’s how i put it.
A Fair exchange is one in which both parties see beauty and each side then follows through to fulfill its terms.
I don’t know for beauty, but both agreed to the exchange. Also, Liberty IS a factor. One person may think, in this ‘Fair exchange in a fee environment’ , that they expected more, but in a free environment by not ‘walking away’ from the deal it is considered ‘fair’.
I really think you are overthinking things. This is human nature: we are born egocentric tyrants and we have to be taught it’s in our self interest to not be tyrants.
Leftists believe such teaching damages self esteem. They learn tyranny is acceptable if the cause is ‘fair’. And by fair I mean the ‘I see beauty’ ego boosting subjective notion to own as ‘social justice’.
Morality to a tyrant is as subjective as ‘fair’ ; proggs are not missing a leg of the stool, they subject morality to the shifting sands of feelings, and nothing feels as good as power to a tyrant.
Known, not ‘to own’…
Case in point:
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/07/09/h8-wins-oregon-threatens-home-of-christian-bakers/
Now if you were talking to one of these Oregon tyrants, which tent pole would you tell them they are missing?
Care (for the so called weak) advanced with Fairness and especially Liberty given short shrift. Alas; a one pole tent.
They care about equality you philistine.
And what about the liberty of clit lickers to buy a cake?
It’s only fair…
They care about control
equalityyou philistine.There’s a book by the British science writer Matt Ridley titled “The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation” some of y’all may find pleasant or profitable on these various questions. There’s even a small bit of De Waals’ monkey business in it, though more chimps than monkeys actually. David Ricardo makes a star turn as well.
Thanks for the tip sdferr.
From one of the commenters:
From my perspective Fairness is the moral sentiment that supports freely exchangeable property rights. Care restrains us from taking advantage of the weak or disadvantaged and the love of our own Liberty restrains us from violating the liberty of others.
> love of our own Liberty restrains us from violating the liberty of others. <
you be proggslam you cake baker.
Here’s a good read::
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/07/are_the_scales_falling_from_our_eyes.html
It gots tent poles all over the place…
billy solus
“A Time for Choosing” by Ronald Reagan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXBswFfh6AY
Exchange vs Distribution.
A bible story that illustrates the idea of distributive fairness, and combines it with the elements of a fair exchange, is the story of the Workers in the Vineyard. (Mathew 20:1-16) In the parable, Jesus tells of the vineyard owner who went into town early to hire workers, who agreed to work the day in exchange for one Denarius. Later that afternoon the owner returned and hired additional workers. At the end of the day the owner paid them all one Denarius, but those who started earlier felt slighted, because the owner paid them the same as those who worked a shorter day.
The owner was fair to the workers for two reasons; first, he paid them the amount agreed upon and second, he was free to award a larger proportional amount to the second group because he was free to do what he wanted with his own property. The first group agreed to an exchange in which both saw beauty and the terms were followed. The second group was paid for their work, plus an additional gift, from the owner.
The moral of the story is that the rules/considerations are different when fulfilling the terms of an exchange than they are for distributing gifts. Exchange embeds fairness – distribution reflects care.
I got you some fairness and care…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uvyc-CiLZxQ
Funny thing I noticed. This verse:
Please don’t anger me
I find it hard to bear no fairness
Originally was:
Please don’t anger me
I find it hard to bear no
fairnessmalice.Funny how words get confused, huh?
Don’t betray my trusted promise
Please don’t anger me
I find it hard to bear no fairness
Cheating – a betrayal of trust
How do you know the original?
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