Daniel's Outlet

Noise

2011-11-16T18:57:00.000-05:00

There are times when one's mind is full of noise. This is distinct from a mind that is very actively thinking things over. A noisy mind is one which considers many things without resolving them, which worries without settling, which ponders or constructs with no real goal in mind, which cannot choose for itself what it will think about. I say "noise" because this state of mind is extremely disrupting and is something that cannot be ignored, anymore than a jackhammer ripping away a sidewalk can be ignored.

How does noise disrupt? Like any harsh or loud sound, it fills up every space available to it. The mind works by moving into or out of empty space. You begin with a calm state of affairs, a blank slate on which you can begin a thought process. Over the calm, over the space, is imposed a new order.

When you've finished with your project for the moment, you can set it down knowing that nothing will knock it over in the meantime. Your workshop is a quiet place where ideas stay put. When you return to the thought process, it might require dusting off or some tightened screws, but it is largely ready to go for more development.

Sometimes thought processes grow beyond the original boundaries of the experiment. You need space around the workbench to extend the project: without it, the ideas get cramped and are difficult to unfold according to their potential. In the worst case scenario, they become stuck and unusable.

Mental noise permeates the empty space of one's mind. It bumps up against the borders of existing projects and keeps you from being able to stabilize the foundation for additional thought processes. Every time you turn around, it knocks over one of your works of art, which at least partly shatters on the floor. While you get a broom to sweep up the pieces, it scatters them around the floor like a gusting wind — and you might experience the displeasure of stepping on a shard of the scattered idea in entirely the wrong context.

The person whose mind has been beset by noise cannot possibly hope to move beyond whatever stage all of his projects were in at the time the noise began to creep into his mind. He spends his precious time erecting noise barriers and acoustic dampeners to create quieter zones in the room — far from ideal, and constraining, but nevertheless better than the chaos before. In these small corners the noise is not absent, but it is under control.

What's more, noise disrupts the largest and most important projects one has been constructing. It descends on big ideas like a fog, and it colors over your blueprints with a black marker. You begin to build offshoots of your towers — seeming improvements that add nothing to the purpose of the building except dead weight and bulk. Before long you wonder what it is you were trying to accomplish in the first place, and turn your attention back to more pressing matters.

Quiet is a precondition for the mind's highest activity, which is the consideration of the most abstract and thinkable things: the things that can be chewed on indefinitely, the stuff of perpetual meditation, and the timeless realities that form a kind of refuge for the unrepentant seeker. The contemplative life presupposes a rock-solid foundation of mental order.

The Regression Theorem and Gold

2011-09-15T12:41:00.001-04:00

Strictly speaking, Austro-libertarian economists favor a free market in moneys and are, so far as economic science itself is concerned, agnostic about what commodity should be chosen for use as money. But it’s no secret that libertarians in practice favor the idea of a gold standard, or in some cases an arrangement where gold is used for big purchases and silver for smaller purchases.

This preference for gold can sometimes manifest itself in a way that seems contradictory to their laissez-faire attitude. If there should be free competition in money, why talk about gold as though it ought to win? Why advocate, for example, a government reform explicitly aimed at recognizing gold and silver as legal tender?

I think the tension exists because, while Austrians think the choice of money is entirely open to the market, they reject the idea that the thing chosen as money is at all arbitrary. An Austrian can confidently predict, for example, that paper tickets will not win out on the market over commodities with preexisting exchange value. More specifically, Austrians hold to the monetary regression theorem, which says that the phenomena of money arises when a commodity with a preexisting exchange value comes to be preferred universally as a means of indirect exchange.

Austrians remain open to the idea that anything selected by the market as a medium of exchange should serve as money. But keeping the regression theorem (MRT) in mind, the following argument from history and applied to our situation today will make sense out of why Austrians demonstrate a preference for gold:

MRT shows that markets must have chosen money from already valued commodities, and that this link is essential for economic calculation via prices.
Historically, gold and silver have been the money of almost every advanced economy.
Therefore, gold and silver have historically been essential for economic calculation via prices.
Therefore, governments ought to legalize using gold and silver as money.

It should be clear that, if we lived in a world that did not have gold and silver, the MRT would still be in force. So also should the Austrian preference for gold be understood in this context: a historical observation bolstered by their belief that markets do not choose money arbitrarily.

Jesus wept

2011-08-17T22:54:00.000-04:00

The shortest verse of the New Testament might also be the best refutation of Stoicism. If God incarnate and true man undergoes passions that follow from and strengthen the actions of his reason, and if he can weep over the loss of something external, then what is really left?

Who Says Mises Should Be Baptized?

2011-08-09T22:43:00.000-04:00

A friend passes along this blogpost, by a distributist who is disturbed to see Catholics embracing the economic ideas of an atheist Jew.

The sad thing is that Mises was his own undoing in this area. He bought into cultural Enlightenment thinking far too much. For him the culture of liberalism was as important (in some ways) as the reforms they sought and the ideas they held. And he also didn't really get Church teaching, as merely his interpretations of Jesus and the gospels makes pretty clear (that is, to all but Catholic socialists and distributists, it would seem).

Not that this misstep of his means he deserves obscurity, which is what the distributists would like to see. But it does mean a large number of rank-and-file, less-than-critical-thinkers in that movement will have little to no motivation to crack open one of his books. (Just like so many Protestants won't consider Catholicism, not because they've already researched it and judged for themselves, but because by default it's other and that which is to be rejected. And so on with any movement that has a rank and file.)

Most of all, it gives the intellectual leaders of that movement just that much more ammo to stifle the actual ideas at play. I said this was "sad" at the beginning because this latter trend would have made Mises — a man concerned almost entirely with ideas if ever there was one — very sad indeed. I think had he foreseen these reactions, he might have reconsidered his stronger stances against the Church, and withheld critical judgment until he had better understanding.

Neither does it excuse his critics from making a similar error, but that's the tragedy of it all I suppose.

Knowledge and the good

2011-08-09T21:33:00.000-04:00

"If you really knew it was the right thing to do, then you would have done it."

How to connect knowledge with right action? We might claim (as Socrates did) that all sin is an intellectual error, a mistake, ignorance. But we might instead make the distinction that it is one thing (or faculty) to know the good and another thing (or faculty) to desire it. Or, in other words, we might say that humans have a will, an inclination, a faculty for incorporating judgment into appetites.

I once heard it claimed that the "application" section of a good sermon delivered from the pulpit — ideally 1/3rd of the speech — was nice but ultimately redundant. If you learn more about God's character, if you truly learn who He is, the argument went, then you will see that play itself out in all of your life choices. (Presumably from brushing one's teeth to deciding whether to change careers.)

I've always been skeptical of the claim merely because it's difficult to see what causal connection there really is between an affirmation of some theological premise and the practical judgment of what color socks to wear in the morning, or whether exceeding the speed limit constitutes sin.

There is simply no string of syllogisms, relying only on the data of God's character, that can move in pure deduction from abstract theology to speed limits. You have to have ethical and political theory to speak coherently about speed limits; and to do that you need to discuss something other than God — namely, his creation.

But I suppose if we were to explore the idea that knowledge of God must have an impact on our actions, a good place to start would be to talk about our will. In coming to know God we come to know truth and the good, because God is Truth and God is Good. It is imperative at this stage not to overlook the necessity of, not just knowing that truth and good, but also our desiring it as good and truth.

Hitchens and necessary morals

2011-05-27T15:25:00.001-04:00

“Nine times out of ten, in debate with a cleric, one will be told not of some dogma of religious certitude but of some instance of charitable or humanitarian work undertaken by a religious person. Of course, this says nothing about the belief system involved: it may be true that Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam succeeds in weaning young black men off narcotics, but this would not alter the fact that the NoI is a racist crackpot organization. . . . My own response has been to issue a challenge: name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer. As yet, I have had no takers. (Whereas, oddly enough, if you ask an audience to name a wicked statement or action directly attributable to religious faith, nobody has any difficulty in finding an example.)” — Christopher Hitchens, introduction to The Portable Atheist

What is Hitchens actually proving here? I think he thinks he’s demonstrating that (i) religious people most often rest their faith on the good fruit it produces, but that (ii) religion is neither necessary nor sufficient for ethical behavior, and (iii) besides, religion seems to motivate a great deal of unethical behavior.

His first claim is empirical, drawn from his own experience in conversing with religious people. It doesn’t address the question of whether the reasonableness of religious belief need be dependent on the humanitarian efforts it generates. (I also doubt it’s true, but since it’s Hitchens’s experience we are discussing I can hardly do anything but grant him the benefit of the doubt here.)

The second claim is both less and more controversial than Hitchens intends it to be. I say “less” because, while there are a good number of religious believers who think ethical behavior is impossible absent some kind of grounding in faith, in fact that is far from the only (and perhaps even the majority) opinion on the matter. Jews, for example, believe that their specific laws for full ethical behavior apply only to Jews, and that there is a fairly loose set of requirements that keep Gentiles in good standing with God and neighbor in their own way. The basic Catholic position, as articulated by St Thomas Aquinas and the entire natural law tradition, holds that human beings are capable of engaging in ethical conduct in virtue of being human.

I say “more” controversial, however, because Hitchens engages in a bit of question-begging with this argument. “Name me an ethical behavior that requires religious faith,” he says, “and I’ll show you how in fact it does not.”

OK: how about the virtue of piety, of showing due respect and honor to God?

“Ah,” says Hitchens, “but that is not a virtue at all!”

Perhaps it isn’t, but for the present moment piety is not a virtue purely because Hitchens has defined it away. But then what is the force of the argument supposed to be? We end up with the True Scotsman fallacy: show me an ethical principle that requires religious faith, and I’ll show you an ethical principle that isn’t a true ethical principle.

What Hitchens’s skepticism leaves out is the possibility that ethical behavior has as its first principles human nature, but that those principles are illuminated and informed by religious faith. Thus an atheist might come to know and embrace ethical behavior, but without faith he will be lacking a certain perfection of that knowledge and even make mistakes on account of his being blind to the reality of our spiritual obligations as human beings.

The question, then, is not whether a believer or unbeliever can come across, embrace, and perform ethical actions. The real question would concern the perfection and completeness of such virtues. (Delve into those questions, and I do think there is a strong case to be made that the believer enjoys possibilities unbelievers do not.)

Thus, I find Hitchen’s argument here to be flaccid, which can be demonstrated by reversing the roles (and here we address his third claim):

My own response has been to issue a challenge: name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a nonbeliever that could not have been performed by a believer. As yet, I have had no takers. (Whereas, oddly enough, if you ask an audience to name a wicked statement or action directly attributable to materialist dogmatism, nobody has any difficulty finding an example.)

What happens? I honestly cannot think of an atheist virtue that precludes believers. Perhaps something like “religion dismantling,” since to enlighten your fellow man might be a virtue. Or perhaps something along the lines of “political humanism,” which is akin to our earlier example of naming “piety.”

So if the argument works both backwards and forwards, are we really saying anything particularly meaningful or incisive? In this case, I do not think so.

John 4

2011-05-24T22:15:00.001-04:00

When Jesus speaks with the Samaritan woman, he famously reveals to her details of her life that no stranger could know, and he uses that as a springboard to develop a conversation with her. He seems to read her mind with each step, taking a little information that she gives him and using it to reveal to her a greater truth.

(E.g., When he asks after her husband, she responds that she has no husband, and Christ reveals the full extent of her situation. When she responds that he is a prophet and asks his opinion on where to worship, he reveals to her not just where to worship but how. When she responds that the “how” is to be revealed through a person, he reveals that he is that man.)

What I hadn’t noticed until recently is that his first interaction with the woman fits the same pattern. Jesus asks her for a drink, and after her puzzled response he tells her: “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

It is true that Jesus tells her this to reveal himself in some way, to demonstrate to her that he is the source of divine life. Just like his prediction that she had five husbands and was living with another man revealed something about him (“sir, I can see that you are a prophet”).

But it’s easier to notice that the five-husband remark reveals something also about the Samaritan woman, since its content is so shocking. What’s more hidden is that Jesus’s remark about living water also tells us something very important about the Samaritan woman: “if you knew . . . you would have asked him and he would have given.” Jesus is revealing to the Samaritan woman something that was hidden inside her, something noble that was hidden along with her moral shame and luck-of-the-draw degraded place in life.

“You would have asked.” As if to say, you desire to ask; your inmost being longs for this; you know in your heart that you search for God. You want what will give you life in the fullest, and if only you knew its source you would not hesitate to seek it out.

And by naming this to her, Jesus not only makes her aware of this reality but brings it to fruition. It’s a picture of how God’s grace awakens our innate desire for him (even without our awareness) and brings it to completion as a work of charity, for our own good. He uses what he has placed there by design.

ST I.II.q14.a6

2011-05-06T12:34:00.001-04:00

In the sed contra: “'No one is moved to that which he cannot possibly reach' (De Coelo i, 7). But it is impossible to pass through the infinite.”

One of the bolder claims of some of the Great Books / Great Ideas advocates is that our conversation necessarily cannot come to a satisfactory answer. We could read the Meno and discuss it ten thousand times without truly plumbing its depths.

There lurks in this reasoning a kind of futility that makes me uncomfortable. I’ve noted before on this blog that it seems strange to me to think a mortal could write a work so complex and rich that the text itself gives us access to indefinite ideas.

But even supposing that could be done, would it even motivate an eternal conversation? We converse because we make progress. But infinite progress is not possible, because its end is out of reach. Our conversations, therefore, must have some specific end to which they aspire (even if we cannot articulate that end precisely in the moment of conversation) — and if they have an end, then they are definite in principle.

Any claims that we can explore the Great Ideas indefinitely, then, must be claims about the de facto nature of our conversation — that we are limited by issues of time, brain power, having to work and eat, and the like — not claims about the nature of the conversation itself. But I think descriptions praising the intellectual life very often slip into the latter, that is, into a belief that the conversation is the end, not the means.

2011-03-10T17:25:00.001-05:00

Somewhere near 90 percent of the times that I read something I wrote more than (say) four months ago, I am deeply embarrassed at what I see. Roughly 9 percent of the remaining cases do not embarrass — but neither are they particularly impressive. In the remaining 1 percent of cases, I am impressed with what I wrote — but most often because I gain some insight regarding my thought processes at the time. Usually it’s a thought process that I’ve since fallen out of the practice of using, or have lost altogether.

For example, I just came across an argument I made about a year ago that, as I (back then) first presented it, now makes me shake my head in disagreement. But I kept reading, and through an expression of the argument in symbolic logic, by the end of it was once again(!) convinced of its truth.

And then came the realization that I had that insight because at the time I was steeped in symbolic logic, typically completing some 10-15 proofs a day. I am a firm believer that philosophy and logic are by and large useless for practical day-to-day living in any direct sense. But here is the clearest example of how they are useful, indirectly, that I’ve seen in some time: not only does logic give you the tools to assess complex arguments with remarkable clarity, but it gets you thinking about arguments you would never have considered otherwise.

In my own case, having been out of formal classes for some three months, I can by looking in the past already see the ways in which my mind is running around in a much more confined space.

2011-02-24T09:44:00.001-05:00

For Aristotle, a good argument’s premises must be:

True
Primary
Unmediated
And, in relation to the conclusion, they must be:

More knowable,
prior to, and
causes of it [the conclusion]

“Appropriateness” follows from these characteristics. Modern physicists have a problem in trying to defend the idea that more elegant and explanatory solutions are to be preferred: say, the heliocentric model of the solar system over the geocentric model. It’s clear that certain models work much better for our purposes, which leads some scientists (e.g., Hawking) to claim that they are preferable only insofar as they are more useful to us.

But not all elegance is preferable, since there are any number of absurd ways to describe particle interactions that are simpler and more elegant than current theories.

I suspect there’s a deeper way to justify the elegance criterion, and my mind wanders to Aristotle’s discussion of what makes premises good premises. All scientific knowledge is the project of demonstrating that there are causes and effects and that the relationship between these is one of necessity. The more elegant models are in general going to exhibit the qualities of being primary and unmediated, as well as being more knowable and prior to the conclusions. So it seems to me that one should be able to construct an Aristotelian argument for elegance.

2011-02-06T23:52:00.001-05:00

Every year at this time I read at least one op-ed that invokes the term “civic religion” to describe football. I don’t think it’s ever occurred to these writers that US civic institutions are actually Americans’ civic religion.

Half-baked thoughts on the Great Ideas

2011-01-04T23:29:00.001-05:00

I have developed two objections to the Adler-Hutchins concept of the Great Books and Great Ideas — very much spelled with capital letters. One objection is a top-down objection, and the other is a bottom-up objection.

Bottom-up: At their most romantic moments, Adler and Hutchins viewed the Great Ideas of Western civilization as a kind of salvation for the human race, achievable when brick layers and CEOs alike would at the end of the work day get together to discuss Plato or Euclid. In their view the Great Ideas were obtainable by the rabble in virtue merely of their being human. It was thus the task of the Great Books facilitator to awaken this innate sense of philosophy and to get out of the way as it bloomed and expanded. Though the idea was to get the masses in touch with the highest of ideals, the upshot would be best embodied in the practical consequences of a mass movement back to the Great Ideas. Adler called democracy — and in particular a democracy of well-informed citizens — an “infinitely just” social arrangement. Hutchins believed that a one-world government would be the secular salvation of mankind.

I say that this is a “bottom-up” objection because I have come to disagree with Adler and Hutchins on this issue as it pertains to the common person. The Western tradition from the time of Plato and Aristotle has seen philosophical inquiry and the Great Ideas as the terrain of those who are living a contemplative life. And one of the marks of the contemplative life is its relative scarcity. It’s hard, and very few human beings even make the attempt to do it. It is true that any human being, qua their humanity, has the potential to achieve it. But it is also true that there are many developments in moral character and luck-of-the-draw circumstances that must align before someone is truly ready to tackle speculative reasoning. In the same way, anyone can be virtuous . . . but few are. There is no trick that we can apply to the masses, after which they will “wake up” to the idea of virtue and bring about our new political life.

Top-down: One of the key criteria of a Great Book is, according to Adler and Hutchins, that it be inexhaustible; that is, that one cannot ever truly master it as a book, and that subsequent returns to the work always yield additional fruit.

Now, I cannot claim to be in a position to have mastered any great book. But this idea seems to me to miss the point. A Great Book, despite it’s capital letters, was written by a specific person with a finite mind at a definite time. The ideas is tries to encapsulate may be discussed indefinitely, but the work itself, as a medium for approaching those ideas, will only have a finite degree of serviceableness. And surely there could be born a person with a mind competent to truly master just one of the great books, for the simple reason that the (say) 100 great books of the Western tradition were not written by the 100 greatest minds of the Western tradition.

Again, not that I have ever met Plato’s match in person. But the romanticism required to stake out such a claim seems to detract from the gritty reality of some of the great books of the Western world. Like the double-columned 8-point font used in the Great Books set, the idealism can make these very ideas remote and unusable.

From Anti-anti-wealth to anti-wealth

2010-12-30T20:24:00.001-05:00

Jeffrey Tucker once commented,

Ah for the days when the socialists believed in material progress! That is no longer the case. …

In a strange way, this is a betrayal of Karl Marx,whose key complaint about capitalism was that it failed to uplift the worker: “The modern laborer … sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth.”

Lenin's slogan was "Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country." Measuring the GDP was a source of great pride for countries, as were big innovations in space travel and military technology.

As a boy, Frank Chodorov would pass by trendy coffee shops and overhear the social democrats and Marxists anticipating the future. At that time, in the first half of the 20th century, they were still pro-material progress and optimistic regarding historical trends:

But, on the whole, these socialists were evolutionary, rather than revolutionary; they dreamed of the day when capitalism shall have decayed, from its internal deficiencies, when a mere push from the proletariat will topple it. They were willing to let the immutable forces of history do the job, and contented themselves with talking; there was little inclination to help the forces of history along. That was long before Lenin came along with his doctrine of dynamism.

The initial objection to the private ownership of the means of production was that it was, necessarily in Marx’s view, an inefficient means of spreading the wealth. To be a socialist was to be pro-wealth, or (perhaps more in line with Marxist rhetoric, which was more dour than joyful) anti-anti-wealth.

But the march of history did not feature the capitalist society undoing itself through an inefficient distribution of material progress among the most poor. Rather, those poor living in free economies had the greatest century in the history of mankind — speaking purely from the standpoint of material well-being. The lower social classes were never closer to revolt than in Marx’s own time, and as decades passed so also did the very resentment he sought to cultivate.

As a consequence, somewhere along the line being a social democrat became synonymous with being a reactionary against consumerism, greed, and excesses in wealth. The crucial point, however, is that it was not concerned with the consumerism, etc., of the rich, but rather the alleged greed etc. of the average member of society — the very person Marx would have identified as a proletariat.

Socialism took a step away from being a progressive movement identified first and foremost with advocating material progress and entrenched itself as the reaction against the evils brought about by material progress. From this perspective, socialism has become essentially a reaction against other, more fast-paced movements. It has moved from the cutting edge of social theory, attracting followers with its confidence in its own inevitability, to today, where socialism mostly denotes a school of thought in search of adherents who are willing to stand against the tide of history.

The inclination to good in evil

2010-12-04T09:52:00.001-05:00

Aquinas writes, “Good can be more pure than evil, for there is some good in which there is no admixture of evil, but there is nothing so bad that it does not have some admixture of good. But in us there is something which always inclines to evil, namely, the tendency to sin [fomes]. Therefore, there will be something which always inclines to good.” (De Veritate 16.a2)

There is no evil that we can perform that is without an inclination to the good. Any evil can be the first step toward redemption and reformation, because in every inclination is an inclination to the good. We can meet any sinner, and likewise anyone else can meet us in our sin, on his own/our own terms. And surely this is where God often gets his first foothold in the life of a natural-born enemy of his.

Passions and intellect

2010-12-04T09:50:00.001-05:00

One of the reasons that Aristotelian philosophy worked (and continues to work) so well is that his most important insights were conceptual distinctions rather than matters of content. That is to say, what he posited transcended concrete circumstances such that it could be applicable to many data sets.

For example, it remains pertinent to distinguish between the intellect and passions, despite the fact that continuing research appears to blur the distinction between the two. Had he defined passions and intellect merely by the content of each — for example, that passions concern this and that emotion of the gut, whereas intellect concerns these other emotions of the brain — he’d be prone to falsification. The question of whether love is an act of the intellect or passions, or both, is in a sense open to experimentation and the scientific method. But what Aristotle proposes, the distinction itself between capacities that are essentially embodied and capacities that are essentially nonmaterial, is not subject to the same tests.

While I was first writing a draft of this blogpost, the power was out in my house due to a lightning storm, and the dog was sitting up against my leg trembling at the insecurity the storm causes her. It occurred to me that a dog could have the neurotic condition of being in such fear all of the time, through chemical imbalance or some other cause. Such a sad affliction would be a disease of the brain, but not of the mind.

We can’t know for sure, but I would guess that Aristotle didn’t think that dog neurosis was centered in the brain of the animal. There’s a good chance he would have placed it in the way the blood rushes through the dog’s veins or in some other organ malfunctioning and secreting the wrong substance. Had he hung his hat on the idea, he’d have looked foolish in hindsight.

Most scientists are already committed to the idea that there is no such thing as reason beyond certain brain states — the brain is the mind. This is a stance that, as far as I can tell, is the same as claiming that there are only passions, and not also intellect.

So the scientist of today might conclude that certain neuroses of dogs and men are problems of the brain, and therefore also problems of whatever that thing is that philosophers have posited as ‘mind’ for all of these years. A philosopher, on the other hand, would take the additional data that dogs and humans have neuroses of the brain to tell us that at least some passions are centered entirely in the brain. Two different interpretations of the same phenomena.

Because ‘intellect’ and ‘passions’ is a philosophical distinction Aristotle makes, and wasn’t a given body of content regarding his observations of men and beasts, the theory can fit many data sets. Indeed, it isn’t falsifiable and cannot itself be put to experimentation. So of what use is it, then? Well, we are left to deal with it in terms of theory; in terms of reason itself. And on that account, Aristotelianism has held up very well over the years, because the distinctions he made were very good ones.

2010-11-25T23:38:00.001-05:00

The problem with most dystopias is that they allow for the possibility of an iron-fisted tyranny that doesn’t suffer from attempting to ignore the laws of economics. The better dystopias seem to recognize this to some extent, but tend to portray it only via a kind of internal, beneath-the-surface cultural chaos — a decay that suggests that the world cannot continue on like this forever. The worse ones make it seem like the overlords will continue in that fashion forever. The more interesting literature at least hints at signs of collapse, even as the despot is at the height of power.

Some distinctions

2010-11-12T15:28:00.000-05:00

I have for a long time been trying to sort out the relationship between economics and ethics, as well as the relationship of both to faith. One question that causes considerable controversy is the degree to which economics is a part of, or under the command of, or separate from, etc., the Church. My own basic view of economics is that it is a science in its own right and not something else, e.g., a special kind or sub-branch of ethics. As such, investigations into the truths of economics (as with other sciences, like physics or geometry) will require its own special tools and not be subject to the general teachings on faith and morals of the Church. But that doesn't mean that some matters of faith and morals do not also have economic aspects to consider, or that economic truths do not have ethical aspects to them. So the relationship needs to be clarified.

As a means of clarification, I've prepared the following distinctions. First is the basic outline of distinctions I have in mind. Next is a parallel outline of concrete examples, each corresponding to the principles above. Finally follows an explanation. I post these tentatively, as they are but the summation of my thoughts up to this point and remain distinctions and thoughts that I adhere to, rework, and revise.

Distinctions:
A Speculative science
B Practical application
     1: Application of economics not in matters of ethics
     2: Application of economics in matters of ethics
          2a: That which (A) has an essential bearing on
          2b: That which (A) has no essential bearing on, but still informs
               2b.1: Unchanging principles; future development is closed
               2b.2: Principles that can be developed
                    2b.2a: Compatible options for future development
                    2b.2b: Incompatible options for future development

Examples:

A The vast majority of Rothbard's book Man, Economy, and State
B Bringing an economic perspective to a given question or problem
     1: The captial structure / efficiency of this company
     2: Minimum wage
          2a: Minimum wage laws considered generally
          2b: "Catholics should pay X minimum wage to their workers"
               2b.1: Condemnation of usury as such
               2b.2: Whether people can charge interest on loans
                    2b.2a: "People can charge interest on loans"
                    2b.2b: "There is no such thing as 'excessive interest'"

On (A), it is clear that economics as a speculative science is entirely separate from the competence of the Church. It is not, as a science, a matter of faith, because no science is a matter of faith. But it also lies outside of practical application, and therefore morals. And since it lies neither in faith nor morals, it cannot properly be within the competence of the Church. (Those who are anxious to pontificate about "Catholic economics" often underestimate the degree to which economics is its own proper science, and minimize its boundaries and/or significance, e.g., the science of economics is limited to "general statements about man as an economic actor.")

The application of economics to practical matters is sometimes not a matter of ethics and sometimes a matter of ethics. When the application of economics to a practical matter has an essential bearing on an issue of ethics, it follows that the economic argument is both important to the matter and that it cannot be denied except by way of another economic argument. For instance, we cannot force minimum wage laws to have their intended effect through moral reason or action. They do not fail for want of trying; though a matter of ethical importance, minimum wage laws do not escape the laws of economics. Therefore, on matters of morals over which economics wield decisive power, what the Church says cannot be understood in such a way that it contradicts economic truth.

Some ethical judgments do not hinge on the truths of economics. For example, the Catholic Church might legislate that Catholics must pay a minimum wage to their workers. The fact that minimum wage laws do not have their intended effect is irrelevant to the moral responsibility of Catholics to pay the minimum wage (assuming the Church asks them to). One may still point out, via economic science, that a minimum wage will not bring about it's intended effect in terms of increasing the overall material well-being of the poor, but this is irrelevant to the morality and validity of the Church's judgment on the matter.

In those matters over which economics plays no decisive role, there are unchanging principles and principles that are susceptible to development as articles of faith and morals. An example of an unchanging principle would be the prohibition of usury, which has been the Church's univocal stance from its beginnings. However, the question of what constitutes usury has undergone significant development from the time of the Church fathers to today. It used to be that one could not charge any interest, for all interest was usury; this is not the case today. But some potential developments, like a declaration that all interest rates are acceptable no matter the circumstances, have already been ruled out decisively by the Church.

Aquinas, Commentary on NE, bk 1 lect 14

2010-11-06T17:37:00.003-04:00

“A thing is not called divine only because it comes from God but also because it makes us like God in goodness.”

One of the difficulties in understanding answered or unanswered prayer, or in general God’s interaction and intervention in a person’s life, is the paradox that God’s hand seems to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

A skeptic might object, for instance, that all of the prayers God “answers” have alternative explanations, preferable because there is no need to invoke the supernatural. A cynic, on the other hand, is willing to grant that maybe God has his hand in things, only to point out that he must therefore have his hand in everything and therefore be the author of many evils in addition to goods.

These objections are meant to belittle the believer on the grounds that the idea of an objective act of God is entirely elusive. Either there’s no such thing, or it’s everywhere and so loses its special meaning to a particular individual in particular circumstances. Therefore, the entirety of an “act of God” must be a product of the believer’s own psyche — and what kind of God is that? Certainly not one a skeptic or cynic would care to know.

The skeptic and cynic are onto something with this line of thinking, but I think that they put their finger on a half-truth. They think that by demonstrating that the ‘human component’ is essential for interpreting divine goodness they have shown the absurdity of divine goodness. But what they’ve failed to realize is that the ‘human component,’ far from making God-man interactions meaningless, is readily recognized and embraced by the believer. And in the embracing, the believer becomes like God, which is the whole point of recognizing something as being from God to begin with, since we call things divine “[not] only because it comes from God but also because it makes us like God in goodness.”

2010-10-31T22:22:00.001-04:00

Change and chance put money into the skilled entrepreneur’s pocket. It follows that there is profit to be made in anticipating, and smoothing over, disruptions of any and all kinds. One of the fundamental characteristics of economic activity is driving profits on the margin toward zero.

For the entrepreneurs in the business of anticipating change, this economic fact implies that their services will be pushed ever-further toward the horizon of stasis. Instead of insuring risk, they will insure the risks associated with risks, and then the risks associated with the risks of other risks, and so on. The marginalization of services that smooth over risk has a parallel in processes of production: as wealth increases, actors focus on what are termed “more roundabout means of production.” That is to say, a mechanic no longer builds widgets but only the turbines that power the widgets. A generation later will see mechanics that specialize in the bolts that steady the turbine that powers the widget, and so on ad infinitum.

What does this mean for the consumer? In the case of the production of goods the result is clear: among other things (e.g., increasing quality), a market economy produces a remarkable degree of consistency in the product. Any inconsistencies present risks, and risks are nothing more than profit opportunities for the skilled entrepreneur.

So what about the case of disruptions in general? Insurance markets, financial management, etc. push all risks further into the margins of human action. A market that protects wealth, left liberalized, will strive always toward risk minimization, homogeneity, and consistency — because this is where entrepreneurs will find their bread and butter.

2010-08-29T12:39:00.001-04:00

When people say “that’s all well and good in theory, but not in practice,” they mean one of three things:

(1) A literal reading of the phrase, which implies a misunderstanding of what the term theory means. This view takes theoretical knowledge to be good or bad by some measure other than the world from which it is abstracted.

(2) It’s another, indirect (and obnoxious) way of saying “your theory isn’t very good.”

(3) They are saying that reality is messy in such a way that the intellect cannot properly assess it.

Version (1) strikes me as implausible through and through. Any theory that isn’t practical just is a bad theory, to the degree of its impracticality. To claim that good theories may be bad in practice is to say, on some level, that the world breaks the rules of logic and logical thought.

Version (2) is essentially what I would mean, were I to use the phrase. But to say it while meaning (2) defeats the purpose.

I can see the appeal in (3), because it comes to the same conclusion that a different (and, in my opinion, correct) thought process leads us to. We have all met (and ourselves been) the person who has a theory that does not take into account all of the facts on the table.

But there is a difference between saying that the person has not taken all of the facts into account and that the person couldn’t take all of the facts into account. The latter view, as I write above, holds reality itself to be messy. On some level, the person with this view holds the input of the senses — raw, unprocessed by mind — as more valuable for day-to-day functioning. They wish to validate certain passions as legitimate intellectual judgments. Their defense against rational discourse or analysis is that it’s the wrong tool for the job.

Trade and progress

2010-08-29T12:30:00.001-04:00

Two men are, at very close intervals in time, respectively deserted on the same island in the Pacific and forced to survive there. One man is enormously proficient at almost every survival skill; the other is hardly able to do even the most simple task.

Assuming they are neither enemies nor friends, but simply two men each trying to make their life work, would there be any reason or benefit for the better-endowed individual to trade and cooperate with the latter?

If one answers ‘no’ to this question, and asserts that only charity or some self-sacrificial motivation could make such cooperation worthwhile, one has missed one of the essential truths known through economics.

2010-07-22T15:50:00.001-04:00

How frustrating: I have about a dozen blogposts or blogpost ideas that are not quite "there" yet. I thought maybe if I posted something — even something without content — it would get the ball rolling.

The Greek view of axioms

2010-05-31T17:43:00.001-04:00

We make judgments about corporeal objects because they are below us, and we say not only that they are or are not this way, but also that they ought to be this way or ought not to be… We make these judgments according to the inner rules of truth which we perceive in common. But no one makes judgments about the rules themselves. When a man says that the eternal is more powerful than the temporal, and that seven plus three are ten, he does not say that it ought to be so; he knows it is this way, and does not correct it as an examiner would, but he rejoices as if he has made a discovery. (St. Augustine On Free Choice of the Will, 2.12)

Prices as Information

2010-05-11T11:07:00.000-04:00

One of the objections to the Austrian theory of prices is that it understands prices to be essentially information. The concept of price-as-information is the central feature of the Austrian argument against a planned economy, for without voluntary exchange there are no real prices, and therefore there is no real information on which to plan out how many farms, cars, or bags of tea are needed. But, the objector says, when one reduces prices to information, you are making the claim that any given thing — including human beings, as well as, e.g., their labor — is worth only what market prices say they are worth. It measures everything against the almighty dollar and therefore must repress other legitimate concerns like morality, social justice, and so on. So the objector concludes that Austrian theory is too narrow; although certain of its features may be appreciated, ultimately it fails when one applies it to broader concerns such as political or social problems.

The error of this objection lies in its quickness to believe that Austrian price theory defines prices as most essentially information. If we are puzzled by the phenomenon of prices, and we ask where they come from, it would be insufficient to respond that "prices are information." Prices cannot reducible to mere information, for this only pushes the question back another step: information concerning what? It is better to keep the prices-information connection tied to the specific issues where that relationship is relevant: i.e., primarily in any debate concerning central planning.

So what are prices reducible to? Prices are reducible to human action. "Prices" are a simply way of describing the voluntary exchanges of individuals, who have their own reasons for valuing a given thing. (How absurd it seems, then, to claim that Austrian econ measures everything against the "almighty dollar.")

The price-information objection criticizes the Austrian view for removing important human elements from an account of human exchange. What should be clear is that you can't have an account of prices, rooted in human action, that strips out any essential features of human action. To strip out the latter is to dislodge the former. And since human action includes essentially dimensions of human dignity and worth, freedom, autonomy, man's being a social creature, etc., we must realize that these qualities are a necessary component of any Austrian account of exchange and prices.

Reconciling Plato and Aristotle

2010-04-18T11:13:00.001-04:00

One of the paradigms that tends to separate Plato and Aristotle is how to understand the distinction between Being and becoming. If you see the two ideas as absolutely different or even as opposed (the latter being Plotinus's reading of Plato, it seems to me), then you end up with a dualism and world of dichotomies. Man's curious place as part of becoming but having recognition of, and perhaps even participation in, Being gives rise to the kinds of problems Plato discusses in the Republic.

Aristotle in general sees Being and becoming as related principles, much more so than Plato. For Aristotle, Being is the first principle and prior to all that is becoming. But among the becoming are higher and lower reflections of Being, each thing in its own place with its own share in the nature of Being. Each is dignified within its own kind and has a telos which moves it towards its proper end.

In his later dialogues (and in particular I have been studying the Philebus) Plato sounds less and less like an absolutist on the distinction between Being and becoming. And by opening this door, even through implication or only in principle, it allows the contemporary reader and thinker to make more sense of the continuity of thought between the two philosophers. Plato's account becomes more nuanced and subtle and, to the ears of an Aristotelian, even very Aristotelian sounding.

2010-03-29T11:55:00.001-04:00

Define "positivism" for just a moment as a disposition for saying good and positive things. Often positivists will define themselves in contrast to their environment. One way to combat a critical atmosphere is to herald an overlooked positive. But you can't praise an overlooked thing without an implicit critique. (And one can't talk about how praising an overlooked thing defeats the purpose of positivism without making a critique.) So to define one's self in any way as contrasted with criticalness is to engage in the enterprise of being critical.

Real positiveness must therefore be an unassuming, innocent, and observational activity.

Make your own Barbara syllogism

2010-03-25T17:36:00.000-04:00

Today, walking through the library, I noticed a student whose laptop had a bumper sticker attached to it: "I AM PRO-LIFE."

At the bottom corner of the panel, a much smaller (but still noticeable) sticker read: "Music = Life."

Assignment: construct the syllogism which demonstrates that this man is pro-music.

Resources

2010-03-05T11:03:00.000-05:00

Thomas Merton chided himself for having lived through the buildup to, and execution of, World War II while thinking only for himself. He argued that the holiness and prayers of a single saint are sufficient to stop entire wars. Likewise, he claims that a single mortal sin is more destructive than all of the bombs dropped over those years. For Merton, the spiritual is what is really real. And the battle of good against the vacuum, the privation that is evil is the most real of all struggles. Hence, even one saint could through intersession bring about the nullification of the worst conflict in human history. He saw himself, oblivious to this reality and consumed with his personal interests, as a man culpable in some sense for the war.

His take is different than that of many Christians. Instead of assuming that God must have desired the fullness of the destruction of Europe (for, after all, were there not saints running around in the 20s and 30s?), Merton felt deeply that he himself had missed an opportunity to pursue his own holiness and, as a part of this journey, to have been an instrument through which God prevented the conflict.

For many who would hear them, there is an offensive audacity to these words from Merton, because most of us do not understand causality in the way he did. We do not think that a monk, perched silently in his cell, could have much to do with geopolitical events. The life of the hermit appears to us to be a life of withdrawal. For Merton, however, nothing could be further from the truth: to come into contact with God's holiness, and to partake of that holiness through the activity of one's life, puts a saint in the best position of all of us to impact the world.

Combine this thought from Merton with a empirical truth of our own time: A good number of those who have an attachment to the American armed forces join them because they have a desire to be a part of something greater than themselves. They want, in some small way, to help save the world. And the culture of the United States clearly supports these beliefs, the idea that service to the country through the military is a means of securing, preserving, defending, etc., freedom. The devotion and respect given to those in the armed forces often reaches what one could only describe as a religious loyalty and veneration. (I have been in church services where the American flag hangs proudly and where a hymn to the country was a part of the liturgy.)

Now, combine those two previous ideas with a principle from economics: Among the many hundreds of thousands in the military are, doubtless, thousands of men and women who might have otherwise pursued a life of holiness as priests and religious.

We can show this through the following argument: Many of those serving in the military do so to seek a higher calling; the calling is what they are after, the military merely what they determine to be the most appropriate means to that end. Suppose that no military existed; we would nevertheless have many in the country with a desire to do good in a similar way. These would search for an appropriate means to attain that end. In a culture that had little-to-no military — and a culture which emphasized, instead of national service, service to God — it seems reasonable to think that at least some of these would seek their end by discerning whether God wanted them to be a priest or member of a religious order.

I submit that we have many would-be priests, deacons, monks, and nuns who today believe themselves to be doing God's work through military service. They wear a uniform instead of a habit; they hang dogtags around their necks in place of a stole; they hold as precious photos of their loved ones instead of holy icons; and they grip a rifle in place of a prayer book.

The prayers of a single righteous woman could have overcome every conflict in the last twenty years. Reality is most fully actual in the spiritual life of a saint, bound up in God's love.

We do not see the result of the endeavors of these counter-factual saints because we — and I mean that in the fullest sense of individuality, that is, each of us on our own — have not sought our own sainthood. It is there for anyone who desires it: anyone may become a saint. To pursue one's own holiness gifts the world not only with one's example, but also with one's merits and fruit. Among these, if Merton is right, would be a greater degree of peace in the world effected by holiness.

(Disclaimer: It should go without saying that it does not take a priest or a nun to make a saint. But few can coherently deny that a life specifically dedicated to this purpose alone [i.e., a vocation], with God's grace, bears fruit. Anyone can become a saint, but there are good reasons why monks etc. become saints in such great numbers.)

Aristotle on Higher Order Goods

2010-03-04T19:49:00.002-05:00

"Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim. But a certain difference is found among ends; some are activities, others are products apart from the activities that produce them. Where there are ends apart from the actions, it is the nature of the products to be better than the activities."

Aristotle immediately makes a distinction about ends: some human ends are activities, others are products. In the case of products, what is produced is better than the activities which produced them. Products are made to serve further human ends, and the highest human ends are activities (not products).

When one creates a product, there is a necessary rift that occurs between the ends and the actions: Although what I really want is a nice dinner and an evening to relax at home, there I sit in a cubicle producing accounting records for a company whose mission bored me to death. It is not that I am not getting the thing that I want. When it's 5'oclock I shut down the computer and go home; my ends are satisfied, eventually. However, paradoxically, were I not at my desk producing spreadsheets, then neither could I go home to a dinner and a relaxing evening — instead, I would face hunger and cold weather without any shelter.

But what does spreadsheet producing have to do with dinner and relaxation? Why do I number crunch all day instead of hunt and prepare food, or fashion a couch? The primary activity of my day is a rather indirect route to that which I really want.

We choose to do the seemingly unrelated action because we desire the products it produces; but we desire these products only insofar as they support further (and higher) activities.

I suspect that the suspicion of capitalist activity that lurks in Marxist thought is really a puzzlement at this paradox of ends being "apart from the actions," with products standing in as a bizarre middle stage. It gets interpreted as the alienation of a worker through capitalist exploitation. It confuses the labor itself as an activity greater than the product, so much so that it claims that the lowest order of activity — "actions apart from ends"; product-producing labor — is what gives a product its value. In reality, the higher ends make the products valuable, and the products' value is what makes the lowest-order activity desirable.

One of the reasons that every socialist economy is so unpleasant is because it holds to the thesis that labor is desirable in itself, and the mother of all value.

2010-03-04T12:24:00.000-05:00

Many people have supposed there is a grand narrative to history, and there are a myriad of constructions that parse out known history into well-defined epochs. These ages represent some general trend of human character and point towards a specific climax and resolution to the fundamental problems of the human experience.

Most follow one of three paths: (1) Begin with an innocence, introduce problems, and show how the problems will be resolved and innocence restored; (2) Begin in ignorance and darkness, and show how progressively we are led into the light, finally attaining some happy and near-perfect state through an event or institution; (3) Begin either with innocence or ignorance, and show how our current trajectory leads to an ultimate destruction and obliteration.

In all of the meta-narratives I have read, never once have I seen a narrative that places the contemporary world of the author near the beginning of the journey.

Idea for a novel

2010-03-03T18:23:00.000-05:00

A Christian man, struggling with his faith, finds himself sent back into time through some interesting turn of events. He doesn't know precisely where he is, but being in a dusty village in an arid climate, he happens to find a family who, although poor, can take him in. He spends two years living with them, working the farm / pasture, and learning the language. An early experience witnessing the brutality of some of the men in the village leave him afraid of divulging too much about who he is. The peasants of his village don't have much to tell him about the world — for "their" world ends about 5 miles from the village in any direction — and the protagonist can only narrow down his position in history to about a five hundred-year period. He becomes determined to make it from this remote village to the big city, if only to figure out when he is and decide whether he'll be able to do much with himself.

He eventually finds his way to a city and sets about doing what many of us imagine we would do ourselves: find philosophers and scientists and try to share his knowledge with them. He becomes a teacher with a number of followers, and maybe finds his way into the royal courts. He is terrified of dying without anyone in history ever knowing of his story, of this event not being recorded by anyone.

Eventually, he figures out that he's in Palestine (and has come to Jerusalem) sometime during the reign of the emperor Tiberius. Not only that, but Tiberius has been in power for some time, so it begins to dawn on the protagonist that he may very well be in Jerusalem at the time of Christ's ministry.

Whatever impact he had as a man of the future sharing his knowledge with those in the past begins to fade. No one ever really grasped hold of his strange teachings, and the quirky cult that had risen about him quickly dissolves. Our protagonist begins to shift his focus entirely to his attempt to find Jesus, to see for himself who this historical character is. Without any trouble he is able to gain lots of second-hand and first-hand accounts of the man, although no one he can find seems to know where he is at the moment. He isn't guarded enough in his search and begins to attract the suspicion of men he doesn't want to get involved with. Whatever connections he made with influential people, he abandons them as he tries to move much more secretly. Our protagonist develops the idea that God has sent him back in time in order to save his faith by a direct encounter with the man, Jesus. He wants to find Jesus so that Jesus will know him, know him as a man from the future who is a member of Christ's church.

Finally, our protagonist zeros in on Jesus' location, but must spend a good deal of time following the crowd around and being patient, as it is nearly impossible to get in to see him directly. (So pressing is everyone around him, just trying to come into contact with Jesus.) He tries as hard as he can to witness a miracle, in order to validate his faith, but is never able to see the direct action Christ takes. Because of the crowds and various circumstances, he never gets a good look at the act itself. Instead, he only sees what appears to be the effects of the miracle — a man leaping with joy, claiming that he was blind but now sees, etc.

Then, in a moment of triumph, the protagonist is finally able to break into the circle, past the disciples, and clings to Jesus' clothes. He convinces Jesus through a few carefully planned words that he needs to speak with him, alone. Jesus consents and they walk a ways off together.

Then something strange happens. The protagonist simply does not know what to say; everything he had planned out in his mind evaporates. The pure physical reaction he has to the encounter is the most powerful thing he has ever experienced. (What this would be like, exactly, I cannot say, but I bet there is a really compelling account to write somewhere in here.) Before too long the disciples approach again and Jesus is off.

While he is deeply moved from the experience, the protagonist is left without a clearer picture about who Jesus is. On the one hand, the conversation, brief and Spartan as it was, was life changing. On the other hand, this man who he has believed to be God is really, very human. So human that you would never guess he was also . . . God.

Inner turmoil commences, on a level he has never experienced. Our protagonist had truly hoped that in Jesus' eyes he would find some kind of recognition, some assurance that Jesus knew who he was. That impulse had been burning a hole in his heart the moment he figured out that finding Jesus was possible. And while Jesus certainly looked at him with compassion, our protagonist can't help but suspect the idea, and feel disappointed at it, that Jesus did not really know who he was.

He's no longer sure of what to do with himself. He now faces the prospect of living a short life and dying, without anyone ever knowing what had happened to him. His chance to speak with Jesus directly did not go as he had planned. The disciples are somewhat leery of this strange man and give him stern looks if he tries to get too close to Christ. Deciding that he must know the full story, he decides to follow Christ closely through his death, to see if there really was a resurrection.

He manages to hang around and follow Jesus through the rest of his ministry, which only lasts a couple of months longer. On the night of Jesus' death, our protagonist watches from 50 yards away as the soldiers approach Jesus, as Judas kisses him, and as they lead him away. The disciples scatter, and our protagonist stands in awe of the scene (he cannot believe it is happening before his eyes). Suddenly he is confronted by a sentry who has been circling around, looking for the disciples. He is arrested, without a struggle, and walks a few hundred feet behind the caravan taking Jesus into the city.

Our protagonist is tortured for information, but has none to yield. Many of those he encounters recognize him as the man who had special things to say about the world — crazy ideas like the Earth being a mere speck in comparison to the heavens, about disease being caused by tiny creatures, and so on.

They are about to let him go, having had some fun torturing him and believing him to have no useful information, when a higher authority walks in and demands to know more. It turns out that Jesus isn't giving any information, and they need something in order to be able to kill him. They start torturing again, and our protagonist experiences through his sufferings the worst of his crisis in faith.

Finally, convinced they can get nothing out of him, they threaten him with one final thing. "You claimed before to have ideas that would change the world. If you don't tell us what we want to know, we are going to execute you today and say that you're being punished for having been a con man. No one will ever remember you or your ideas." Our protagonist, coming through his trials with a profound peace about his life, decides that he no longer cares whether he lives or dies. He is in utter despair over the meaning of this experience, and simply desires that it end. They take him up a hill to crucify him.

The protagonist doesn't realize it at first, but he finds himself hanging next to Jesus on a cross. A man on the other side of Christ is mocking him. In a moment of dying faith he berates the man for mocking him, and asks of Jesus merely that he remember him. Jesus gives him a look that pierces deeply into the man's soul, and utters his famous words. Our protagonist dies knowing with every certainty that Jesus knew who he was.

Some responses to hard-line Calvinism

2010-02-25T19:15:00.000-05:00

Take a classic objection to hard-line Calvinism:

1. If predestination is true, then God causes us to sin.
2. If God causes us to sin and yet damns sinners to eternal punishment, then God isn't good.
Therefore, if God is good, then either predestination isn't true or else God doesn't damn sinners to eternal punishment.

It's a valid argument, so we either need to affirm it or deny one (or more) of the premises. What's interesting to me is that different Christians will approach this in almost completely different ways.

Some are sympathetic to the conclusion, and thus argue that predestination isn't true (since, in their view, God does damn sinners to eternal punishment). They essentially buy the argument.

There are some Calvinists (probably most) who would criticize the first premise of the argument. Their typical understanding of free will and predestination is that the original sin of Adam and Eve was an act of free will, and the rest of us (being affected by original sin) no longer have free will — but neither are our actions caused by God. They are instead the product of some natural faculty that has been permeated by sin's effects. Thus, while God does indeed predestine a certain number to be saved, he does not cause our day-to-day actions and the culpability for the sin remains with us.

But the real hard-line Calvinists most often attack this argument by disputing the second premise. Some claim that, while we may not know the reasons for it and it may puzzle us now, we will one day be able to understand how God causes everything to be just as it is while nevertheless holding individuals culpable for their sin by punishing them for all eternity. Others take what I consider to be the hardest stance possible: not only do they claim that they deny the consequent of the second premise, they go as far to say that there is nothing prima facie that should disturb us about God causing us to sin and punishing us for it for all of eternity! ("The whole world is God's, correct? Can he not do as he pleases with it?")

Most (in my experience) fall somewhere in between these two responses. I suspect that they see the hard-line stance as problematic but nevertheless think they should adhere to it.

As for me, it seems best to criticize this argument for its first premise. Predestination seems to me to be a doctrine dealing with grace and salvation. Some have taken it to imply that God must be the cause of everything, but in reality this latter claim comes from an understanding of what it means for God to be sovereign.

However, my position rests entirely on a fairly narrow understanding of the term "predestination." A hard-line Calvinist takes it in the broad, "sovereign" sense that I just mentioned. And if this is what the term means in the argument above, then in fact the argument seems to me to be sound, and a refutation of hard-line Calvinism.

Complex questions

2010-02-16T14:53:00.000-05:00

All loaded questions presented in 'yes' and 'no' format (e.g., "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?") have a correct answer. Using the example in my case, being a married male who has never beaten his wife, the answer is "no." This is because the question (asked fairly or unfairly) is really asking whether (a) one has a wife whom one beats and (b) whether that has recently stopped. In symbols we can render this: (W * S). If both W (having a wife that one beats) and S (whether one has recently stopped beating one's wife) are true, then the statement as a whole is true. If either part is false, the entire statement is false.

We avoid answering loaded questions such as this one for several reasons, among which are: (1) The chances that one's answer will be seen somewhere out of context, and the chances that the answer thus presented will cause damage to someone, are too high to risk indulging someone's misguided question, (2) Out of consideration for the moral and/or intellectual weakness of the person who has asked the question, who will likely take a true answer and twist it for his own purposes, and to his own detriment. It is impossible to justly indict a just person for giving a true answer to a complex question.

Clearing the driftwood

2010-02-14T12:34:00.000-05:00

Even if Aristotle was incomplete in his account of money and exchange, it doesn't follow that his contribution was relatively useless or trivial.

By Aristotle's time, money had already been manipulated by the state: coins circulated for more than the value of the metal they contained, and the value of coins were subject to change by legal fiat. His discussion focuses on analyzing this phenomena, and it is for this reason that he connects money (nomismos) with positive law (nomos). Although incomplete, there is nothing wrong with what Aristotle says in a normative sense: money just was fiduciary in his day, as well as linguistically connected to positive law.

Yet Aristotle is more than simply "not wrong" on money; his theoretical work in fact cleared the way for later thinkers to develop the ideas further, even to the point where they could critique the idea of money as an invention of law. It may sound paradoxical, but the development of monetary theory to the point where it could critique fiduciary media came first from a clear-headed analysis of money as fiduciary media. Analyzing something as it presents itself to us turns out to be an indispensable step in coming to analyze whether it ought to be so from a theoretical framework.

It is in this sense, I suggest, that Aristotle's account of money and exchange even in its incompleteness is nevertheless a valuable contribution to the history of economic thought. Because Aristotle focused on categorizing human phenomena, his work remains relevant over the centuries. If it wasn't for the Ethics, I submit that it is unlikely we would have seen the same sophisticated development of economics during the late medieval period, which is so highly praised by Rothbard. Therefore, when we consider the advances in economic thought made by, e.g., those at Salamanca, we should keep in mind how firmly they were grounded in Aristotle.

Aristotle's lucid discussion of money, introduced only in the 13th century, cleared the driftwood that had kept Europeans from making any progress on the issue for a thousand years. (Their contributions, after all, began as a series of commentaries on book five of the Ethics.)

In other words, we must see medieval economic philosophy as an extension of Aristotelian philosophy — and we must see Aristotle, not as a man prone to descend into gibberish, but as one of the first proto-Austrians in the history of economic thought.

One of the many tensions we must resolve

2010-02-08T21:54:00.000-05:00

One of the tensions that we must deal with goes something like this:

(1) On the one hand, we (as Christians) desire to state that the human experience does not change in kind over time. We believe that we must struggle with the same problems that our biblical ancestors struggled with (or else they lose their relevance). We believe that human nature does not change. We believe that human beings face similar temptations to sin and are called to a certain virtue.
(2) Christians cannot be Platonists in the strict sense of the term. To reject the importance of matter, to deny that it too has being and therefore goodness, to suppose that matter is always becoming and is therefore as such an evil, is misguided (if not heresy).
(3) The material conditions of the world do change. In particular, the economic progress of human beings is such that we have far greater access to consumer goods and capital than has any generation that went before us. That we, the latest generation, have access to these things is no coincidence: the trend in all of human existence is towards an abundance of physical goods.
(4) Given that Christians must affirm an increase in material wealth as a per se good (2), and given that everyone must acknowledge the abundance of material wealth that has been given to us by the previous generations who accumulated capital and increased production, it seems to me that there is some tension between our everyday experience and the principle given in (1).

What does it mean to say that human beings are wealthier than they ever have been, and that this wealth is a per se good? For one, it makes it very difficult for many of us to understand some of the human experience as it appears in the scriptures. So many of those about whom the scriptures speaks lived in abject poverty. Prayers and cries for salvation were cries for a real, physical, and immediate need: be quick to save me, God, for I am about to die now. Asking for "our daily bread" actually meant asking for our daily bread, for our daily bread was not assured.

Although a large portion of the world does experience this kind of poverty, an increasing number of human beings will never know the material conditions which lead to this desperate cry for help.

[Tangent: It isn't enough to caution that with increased wealth comes additional temptation to sin. (Of course this principle is true: how many residents of Asia Minor in the 1st century AD struggled with an addiction to pornography, or an irresistible urge to sit and watch television all day, or rampant gluttony, or were shopaholics, or found their only fulfillment in drug abuse, etc.?) But to claim that our increased temptations to sin somehow counterbalances the remotion we experience from the human condition of biblical times is to perform a kind of moral calculus that is absurd and impossible.]

The question I am raising, in a hopelessly roundabout way, is this: was it easier to be virtuous and good for the 1st century peasant than it was for a 21st century American, or was it harder? Do we face fundamentally different challenges in conquering our own desires to sin? Do we face, on the whole, more temptation to sin? Less?

And how do we account for the difference several millennia of material progress have brought to our daily lives. Are we to pretend that it really doesn't make a real difference, or that whatever differences it has brought to us are negligible? This latter position seems untenable.

In short: how does the human experience for a 21st century Christian compare to that of a 1st century Christian? What impact does this have on how we view our faith, and how we aim to become virtuous, and even holy?

2010-02-08T13:55:00.000-05:00

When in the Tao Te Ching the author calls for inaction on the part of him who would be wise, this isn't a call for nonaction per se. The whole point of "inaction" and "nonthought," as so often the advice goes in the verses, is that the kind of action and thought the wise man pursues looks like inaction and nonthought to one who does not understand Tao. Action within the Tao is a unified expression that includes, but goes far beyond, the decision of the individual in question. It looks to an unknowing outsider like a falling leaf afloat in the wind. "Is not the wind the true cause of the movement?" In a real way, yes! And if this is our perspective, then the action of the one centered in the Tao will look like inaction. When we pursue a life centered in the Tao, our initial baby steps will feel like inaction. This makes inaction one of the most apt metaphors or likenesses by which to describe that which can only be experienced. (For this reason Taoist thought often appears to advocate nonexistence, although on my understanding this isn't strictly the case as it is in, e.g., Buddhism.)

Actions that are not undertaken as a result of one's conscious self-location in the Tao are called "aggression." In the Western tradition of thought we are used to thinking of "aggression" as some act committed against another person or being. Aggression against the Tao is impossible, however; when one commits aggression the act harms primarily the one doing it.

The Holy One of God came to heal

2010-02-08T11:14:00.001-05:00

¹⁶As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. ¹⁷"Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will make you fishers of men." ¹⁸At once they left their nets and followed him.
²¹They went to Capernaum, and when the Sabbath came, Jesus went into the synagogue and began to teach. ²²The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law. ²³Just then a man in their synagogue who was possessed by an evil^[e] spirit cried out, ²⁴"What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!" ²⁵"Be quiet!" said Jesus sternly. "Come out of him!" ²⁶The evil spirit shook the man violently and came out of him with a shriek.
²⁷The people were all so amazed that they asked each other, "What is this? A new teaching—and with authority! He even gives orders to evil spirits and they obey him." ²⁸News about him spread quickly over the whole region of Galilee.
²⁹As soon as they left the synagogue, they went with James and John to the home of Simon and Andrew. ³⁰Simon's mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told Jesus about her. ³¹So he went to her, took her hand and helped her up. The fever left her and she began to wait on them. ³²That evening after sunset the people brought to Jesus all the sick and demon-possessed. ³³The whole town gathered at the door, ³⁴and Jesus healed many who had various diseases.

In this narrative, Jesus heals many people, but in different ways. His act of calling fisherman from the boats is an act of healing, because it brings them into their true vocation. His authoritative teaching in the synagogue is a kind of healing for his listeners, who had often heard the law proclaimed but had not before heard anything like what Jesus taught. He casts out demons and cures the sick. He cares for the family of his chosen disciples and brings peace to their home.

Immediately preceding these short stories, Mark says that Jesus had begun to walk the countryside, preaching the good news of his kingdom. The demons revealed a part of this good news, which Jesus did not want told at the time: that he is the Holy One of the living God. The focus of his mission at this early point in his ministry is to bring healing to everyone he meets. The Holy One of God came to heal.

Sci-fi memes

2010-02-04T13:03:00.000-05:00

Why is it that in science fiction:

(1) The world is most often controlled by one big corporation? I understand the thinking behind the danger of the tendency for corporate and state power to merge, but once such a merge happens, the "corporation" is really just a state. Take the dozens of "private" companies scattered around Washington, D.C., whose sole function is to provide goods and services related to war, and whose only client(s) are the state and/or other companies whose sole clients is the state. Suppose one of these corporations truly takes control of the entire defense industry of the government, and eventually squeezes out everything else that the government does. You do not have a corporation which is now running things; you have a state.

In reality, it seems to me that, in a future and hi-tech society, you'd have either one or several large states with jurisdictions over the world in question, or you'd have an anarchic society. A corporation is a corporation insofar as it is a business that provides goods and services for consumers. The moment services and payment become mandatory, we might still call the entity a corporation, but it is a kind of corporation that is indistinguishable from the state. That corporations always deteriorate the larger they get, unless they can enlist the help of the state, is no coincidence. It is impossible for a business to remain only a business and do the kinds of things "corporations" are always doing in these fantasy worlds.

(2) There is typically a large-scale war being fought, and the main belligerent is a by rule a corporation? Most of my critique of this idea has its roots in (1), but there are several other aspects to consider here:

In all of human history, human society has tended to wage war not over conflicts of business but over conflicts concerning the jurisdiction of enforcing rights and the distribution of property. Where there are laws concerning the ownership of property, you don't have mobsters that require bribes or turf wars. Yet where there are not clear property rights arranged through voluntary contract, human beings have demonstrated that they will engage in turf wars over anything: from (as we have today) drugs, to alcohol (think speakeasies and the mobsters of the 20s), waste management services (i.e., the NY/NJ mobsters, who leverage legal monopolies and union memberships), etc.

Second, when has a corporation ever waged a war? Sure, we are getting ever closer to corporate-state mergers of power (Blackwater), but in all of those cases one finds that it is at heart about the money well-connected individuals can make through their political connections. In the modern era, no corporation has ever, absent state sanction and/or a lack of property rights, set out to declare and fight a war of conquest.

Furthermore, if anything the trend in history appears to be that an increase in the size and scope of the state has led to more numerous and bloodier conflicts. Democracies, in their short history, have engaged in the largest and costliest wars in all of human history. In addition to large-scale wars, the world's most prominent democracies have also engaged themselves in seemingly never-ending wars of a smaller scale that nevertheless pummel an unsuspecting corner of the globe for a decade or more. Wars between democracies and communist countries have threatened for decades and have on several occasions almost errupted. If one looks at the history of corporations and conflict, nothing even approaches these trends.

(3) There is a class (or even caste) of people so poor that even our own lives look luxurious by comparison? The class of poor people are presented as having been the natural development of a society that increasingly embraces new technology, economic growth, and human progress. (It is as if a natural feature of economic progress just is to make the rich richer at the expense of the poor.)

The phenomenon of poor classes being an essential byproduct of economic growth is contradicted by all of the data in our own day and age. In fact, the greater the liberality of the society in question, the more likely they are to be wealthy. And the more liberal and wealthy the country in question, the greater the standard of living tends to be. And the more liberal, wealthy, and high-standards-of-living the society is, the better off the very poorest of that society tend to fare in comparison to the poor in other, less free societies.

The poor classes in a futuristic and technologically advanced society will lead lives that would blow our own minds were we to learn about them, for the same reason that the poor in America are far more likely to be housed, fed, educated, entertained, indulge in luxury, and have support networks than did the poor in ancient Rome.

In such an advanced society, a state or corporation in power may very well impose a level of poverty on the masses that might sink them lower than they otherwise would be. However, such imposition would be clearly aggression and not the inevitable product of the system. It could only be temporary, as states and state-corporation entities will be restricted to leeching off of available technology and could themselves engage only in haphazard and unpredictable economic growth.

In the future, individuals and various pockets of society will leave behind bureaucratic dinosaurs in the dust.

Nature, Habit, and Virtue

2010-01-30T21:17:00.003-05:00

I have heard the principle of "fake it 'til you make it" cited both favorably and unfavorably:

- favorably, because of the intuitive insight that performing an action for the sake of the action and result can help alter one's disposition for doing said action

- unfavorably, because no one likes a liar, and those who smile when they are upset are, in some contexts, committing a kind of lie. There are also those who hold that what is moral lies entirely within: what really matters is the inner disposition, and hence no amount of smiling can betray your inner disposition of being upset.

Of the two, I side more with the former position than the latter. Its standing as relatively closer to the truth is evident when we consider Aristotle's insight that moral virtue comes about as a result of habit. We must note that he says habit, which is to say as opposed to nature. Nature endows us only with the capacity to develop habits one way or the other; habits are themselves what form the character.

You cannot alter, fundamentally, what is endowed by nature. (This is good news for us, since for as long as we remain truly human we have the nature which allows us to improve ourselves through moral virtue.) Aristotle uses the example of "training a rock by throwing it up in the air 10,000 times" in order to show the futility of trying to form habits in certain contexts. A rock sitting on a table is by nature already potentially falling down; by pushing it over the edge, we make its motion active. Human beings, on the other hand, do not potentially have moral virtue in this sense of the word 'potential.' We are not poised to be morally good, waiting only for an external force to begin the process. One could say rather that they have the potential to have moral virtue potentiality (i.e., our nature brings about the 'chance' to have it, whereas that 'chance' is dependent on our choices).

What this entails is that moral virtues can be acquired when (and only when) we exercise them and make them actual. Aristotle compares the process of gaining moral virtue to the process of learning how to play an instrument or some similar art. Just as a painter can only acquire actual painting skills by actually painting, so also is the road to moral perfection only truly started with moral action itself.

Tangent: This principle resolves a puzzle that I have heard posed regarding the relationship between theology and practical action. One claim went like this: Theology is the most practical study, for if our view of God changes or is refined, this will surely have an effect on everything else we have prioritized or hold dear. For surely daily actions and habits are aligned according to our most deeply-held beliefs (and not vice versa). Therefore, those who complain about a lack of 'practical application' features in sermons — a critique often leveled against Protestant preachers — often overstate their case. After all, that theological, theoretical side of the sermon, when grasped properly, provides all of the content one needs to begin acting in concert with the new, or newly rectified, ideas.

I don't find this argument to be persuasive, because I think it conflates what Aristotle calls "intellectual virtues" with moral virtue. Intellectual virtues are learned primarily through teaching, but they also presuppose a richness of experience in the person who is learning them, and plenty of time to sink in. Moral virtue, on the other hand, begins most truly when one simply begins doing the work of making good choices. The foundation for change in most personal behavior is through action and habit, not through what one might call "world-view formation."

Indeed, I would argue that it is somewhat rare that we change our behavior from top down: Try to think of the last half-dozen times you decided consciously to alter and improve your life through behavior. In most cases, we make highly contextualized choices for relatively immediate ends (more immediate to our circumstances, at any rate, than an intellectual contemplation of God). I desire Z, but see that Y stands in my way, so I begin to purposefully do X. While certain abstract truths often serve as, say, the motivation for our changes, the grasping of those truths is not one and the same with making the changes themselves.

If human action is the case, and if . . .

2010-01-20T18:12:00.003-05:00

And if there are ends, then there is teleology. If there is teleology, then there is an inescapable logical structure of means and ends. If there is a logical structure to means and ends, then there is economics.

And if there are ends, then there is teleology. If there is teleology, then there is an inescapable account of why things are directed to some ends but not others. If there is a 'why' for certain ends, there is the good. If there is the good, then there is ethics.

2010-01-20T18:04:00.002-05:00

We become nostalgic cranks because we do not like the state of the world, the future seems scary and uncertain, and it horrifies us to think that the state of affairs has in essence always been this way. There is nothing we can do about the first two problems, but it is easy to counter the third.

Economizing what we take for granted

2010-01-17T22:28:00.002-05:00

Acting human beings have to act using means; that is to say, they economize things by deciding to use them. Have you ever felt yourself consciously making something into the object of your action? This is a very real process that turns what Rothbard calls the "general conditions" of our environment into something we relate to in a different way. He writes:

Men find themselves in a certain environment, or situation. It is this situation that the individual decides to change in some way in order to achieve his ends. But man can work only with the numerous elements that he finds in his environment, by rearranging them in order to bring about the satisfaction of his ends. With reference to any given act, the environment external to the individual may be divided into two parts: those elements which he believes he cannot control and must leave unchanged, and those which he can alter (or rather, thinks he can alter) to arrive at his ends. The former may be termed the general conditions of the action; the latter, the means used. Thus, the individual actor is faced with an environment that he would like to change in order to attain his ends. To act, he must have technological ideas about how to use some of the elements of the environment as means, as pathways, to arrive at his ends. Every act must therefore involve the employment of means by individual actors to attempt to arrive at certain desired ends. In the external environment, the general conditions cannot be the objects of any human action; only the means can be employed in action. (MES, ch.1)

There are times when we stop for a moment to purposefully consider the environment in which we find ourselves. When it rains, I do not get wet; when it is cold, I remain warm; when I lie down to sleep at night, a cozy bed (and, in my case, a wife) await me; when I am hungry (oh, those rare moments when I haven't eaten long enough to truly feel hunger's pangs), I eat. In that moment we attempt to fix our intentions on the very things which typically serve as our environment, as the general conditions that allow us to do still something else.

There is little point in continually berating ourselves for taking these things for granted per se. Imagine the magnitude of appreciation one would have to muster, the focus on what one has, even before one has walked out the door to get to work in the morning. (Here is a quick hit list of items I take for granted in this time span, which is by no means exhaustive: my bed, my wife, my son, my alarm clock, lights, hot running water, soap, shampoo, towels, tons of clean clothes, warm rooms, privacy, the quiet of morning, a stove, non-stick coatings, farm-fresh eggs, the refrigerator, coffee grounds, a coffee-bean grinder, drinkable water from the tap . . . etc. One could fill volumes with encomia on the miraculousness of each of these items individually.) Human beings being what we are, it would be impossible to do anything else.

Nevertheless, there still come occasions when such meditation on the nature of our environment and intentional economizing of everyday things is entirely appropriate. This is typically what people refer to when they ask others to consider for a moment what they take for granted. If I'm locked out of the house for an hour in the cold and it's raining, I am very likely to be intentional about warm, dry spaces and clothes upon my return indoors — and for quite some time thereafter. After a near car crash, a girl continues on the roads with renewed fear, and after arriving safely she hugs her boyfriend with renewed appreciation.

When I was in my teens, I was drawn especially to movies that skillfully evoked this feeling in me. Any media that could cause me — perhaps one could say force me — to draw in my surroundings with focus and intention, any media that could help me economize my environment in a renewed way, was very cathartic to me. I did not know why, but I think I now know.

We work hard to improve the general conditions of our action — contra the primitivists, I'd argue it is a good thing to use cars, mass-produced stuff, and plastic packaging. Making daily life easier gives more people an opportunity to do what only aristocrats in the past could think about (music, art, philosophy, literature). At our best, we improve our environment at least in part for the noble purpose of focusing on higher things.

However, narrowing the scope of our focus in such a way that we "environmentalize" most of our surroundings can have a deadening effect on our souls. At its extreme, we end up in a world where nothing calls us to action and everything is taken care of. Events that we live through (especially tragic events) and literature are especially effective at reawakening us in this respect.

2009-12-11T09:32:00.003-05:00

Give 1,000 monkeys sitting at typewriters an infinite amount of time, and they won't produce the works of Shakespeare. The theorem relies on "monkeys" which are nothing more than random number generators, far from anything a real monkey would do.

Most economic theorems in vogue rely on a scaled-down version of the infinite monkey theorem for human action. "Given humans that will do X, Y, and Z. . .", but they fail for the same reasons.

Terms of agreement

2009-12-08T14:19:00.004-05:00

Is theology a speculative or a practical science? The distinction may seem arbitrary to us or poorly made, but it was the context St. Thomas Aquinas entered when writing his Summa Theologiae. I have heard criticism of St. Thomas before due to the fact that he understands theology to be a speculative science.

"I don't see how you can separate the practical from the theoretical when it comes to theology. Anything that we learn about God requires a response from us."

This is one of the paradigmatic examples to demonstrate the danger of taking a book off of the shelf and just plunging into it. Within five pages Aquinas gives his view on this matter, and for some who read it it's the last chance he will ever get to make his case. To understand an author, our most important task is to come to grips with the terms he or she is using. For most people this is too costly and time consuming — and with good reason. It would be nice if we had the leisure to spend our lives searching after what is true, but the reality is that only a select few may devote most of their energy to understanding the great thinkers of history.

The rest of us require some assistance to go about this task. It makes me wonder about the most effective way to utilize what Aristotle, St. Thomas, and the rest were doing, without watering their project down or losing its importance entirely.

What economics is not

2009-11-30T07:29:00.005-05:00

I was recently at a conference where one of the speakers proposed that a conservative minimal government was the best solution for establishing social order. He retained the qualifier that, while (a) that government is best which governs least and (b) the proper function of government is strictly the defense of individual rights, there are moments when the state must overstep its typical boundaries to address specific concerns (market failures, economic emergencies, etc.).

After the lecture I asked him whether there was any discipline or set of criteria that could assist us in establishing whether a given, proposed intervention was warranted. It seems to me that there is no shortage of proposals to have deeper state involvement in every area of social activity. (Name any aspect of any economic activity, and I will find you someone who believes there to be a "market failure" in just that area, with a suggested regulation or tax to improve the situation.) This lecturer, I presume, opposes most of them. But why?

In my view, my question was a softball, with "economics" being the obvious (but powerful) answer. However, the best this professor could do was suggest that prudence was needed in deciding whether and how a government ought to intervene in a given situation. Answering with "prudence," however, begs the question, for prudence only tells us that some set of principles are needed to address specific situations — and that the person making the decision ought to be well-versed in such principles. "Prudence" doesn't tell us what those principles are.

I was expressing this concern to a colleague after the lecture, and he seemed surprised that I thought economics was sufficient to address the issue. "But not everything comes down to efficiency or material well being." Well, of course I agree that not everything comes down to efficiency or material well being. Still, that says little about whether economics is a sufficient set of principles for resolving the question at hand.

What he expressed is probably the most common view of economics, however. What this view fails to take into account is the science of economics as it is told by the Austrians. Austrian economics is the science of praxis — of action — and as such is neutral on issues such as material well being, or "efficiency" in the sense of some third-party judgment of a man's own decision.

What do a worldy, materialist billionaire and an ascetic monk have in common? Both men are subject to the same axioms of economics. Both act no more or less than the other. Neither qualify as "irrational" for their choices — insofar as they choose — or "inefficient." Both have chosen ends as constitutive components of their own happiness, and have selected definite means with the expectation of achieving their ends. Each has chosen means that are, more or less, well or ill suited for the ends sought. ("Economic" is by no means synonymous with "material.")

When political action is proposed, a specific end is explicitly endorsed as the aim of a given action. Economics is the tool through which we can analyze whether the proposed action will in fact attain the stated, desired end. There is no magical intuition that makes one person "prudent" to judge on political matters and another imprudent. The lecturer's proposed solution ends with the statist and the non-statist raising their voices, asserting the opposite of one another. Unless there is science reinforcing the prudence of the wise person, he or she is making an ill-informed guess.

Tidbits of interest

2009-11-20T15:19:00.002-05:00

Hobbes, being a materialist, imagined that the sum of human brain activity consisted in the mechanical response to external stimuli — that is, data that enters through the senses and then rattles around inside the body while it slowly dissipates. Imagination, according to him, is the "left overs" from a sensory experience; likewise, dreams are mish-mashes of sense experiences that haven't been fully categorized and processed by the brain.

Under this model of human experience and cognition, amusement can hold a high place. All of our experiences slosh around uncontrollably, and so tidbits of interest become a real fixation for the mind. Human beings, thus, grow hungry for little things that will scratch their intellectual itch — nothing to dwell on or really process, of course. Just something to relieve the moment's boredom.

An old priest, commenting on this, said that Hobbes's picture of what best satisfies most human beings "is like the internet." Interesting bits and odds and ends which make you think, but only for so long.

Yet if there is any such thing as "noise pollution," certainly that kind of endless chatter qualifies as that which pollutes the soul. I grow more aware all the time of how deeply I dig myself into routines that feature high ratios of chatter to thought. My own mind has developed quite an appetite for endless hours of random, minimal stimulation. It causes me to wonder whether this is an appropriate opportunity to work in Eastern insights concerning silence, emptying, and letting go — as a kind of preparation for refilling with good things.

Economics as science

2009-11-16T11:29:00.002-05:00

According to Aristotle, we have demonstrative knowledge when we know the causes of a thing, that the causes are the causes, and that the causes are necessary causes.

The first criterion established a connection between A (causes) and B (subject).

The second criterion narrows A to just the right "level" of causality. We know that a human being will die if it's drowned because it is an exclusively air-breathing thing. Saying "because it's an animal" is too broad, since some animals survive under water. Saying "because it ingests water" is too narrow, since some types of water ingestion are good and healthy for human life.

The third criterion is the most important, because it ties to a subject certain properties that derive from the subject's essence. Knowing the essence of a thing, therefore, unlocks scientific knowledge regarding it.

This is extremely difficult, perhaps even impossible, in the vast majority of work done in biology. The process of data gathering and inductive reasoning is a complex and demanding task. For this reason, it has traditionally been asserted that Aristotelian demonstrative knowledge is carried out best in geometry.

This method is proper and necessary for the construction of the science of human action — that is, economics. Economics, like geometry, is a framework of conceptual truths that are built from starting principles derived from the essence of things. And just as one could never do geometry having never experienced shapes, boundaries, angles, etc., one could never do economics without having pondered the peculiar way in which human beings act purposefully. Action, the outcome of reason and deliberation, makes economic science what it is.

Tranquility of order

2009-11-08T12:15:00.002-05:00

Peace is the tranquility of order, as Augustine writes in The City of God. Bonaventure begins his discourse on the journey of the mind to God by asking for God, the source of all illumination, to grant him and us — that is, those on the journey with him — "guidance to our feet on the path of peace, that peace which surpasses all understanding." Thinking of peace for the moment as the tranquility of order, we see that what Bonaventure seeks is to be guided on the path of a tranquility of order which surpasses all understanding.

Order is a kind of harmonious interaction between distinct things. We observe order in creation, and we can apply and impose order on things. What we see we employ, chiefly through the spoken word through which thoughts are communicated. But an order which surpasses all understanding must simply strike us: we have nothing to contribute to it. We can see, therefore, that a kind of silence is required amidst an ordering that we cannot fully grasp. We know that it is well ordered but not entirely why or what makes it so. This stage of recognition is termed by St. Bonaventure an "ecstatic peace." It must be experienced, in silence, and is known only by they who experience it.

Our appreciation of ecstatic peace is an internalized discovery and appreciation of the rectitude things. Wonder draws in our whole being from top-down. Unlike the natural principles we come to appreciate first through sense data and later through abstraction, ecstatic peace impacts our intellect first and flows through it to our sensitive capacities, and even the body itself.

We reach this appreciation of divine order in part through the interior ordering of our lives. It is for this reason that St. Bonaventure says our journey begins in devout prayer and hard work in the development of personal holiness. However, our interior ordering is a necessary-but-insufficient condition for achieving ecstatic peace. Says Bonaventure: "No matter how well-ordered the steps of our interior life may be, nothing will happen if the divine aid does not accompany us." His reason for saying this is that the ecstatic peace we aspire to, as stated before, is of divine origin, above us, and that which we can appreciate (in part) but not ourselves produce.

And even though the ecstatic peace is the end towards which we move, notice that divine assistance is required to go anywhere. God's illumination of our intellects makes the journey possible, begins it, moves it along, and brings it to completion. His light provides certitude along the way — certitude being its own kind of order, a certain way of the mind rightly perceiving itself to be rightly perceiving other things.

Even as an activity fundamentally above our own natures, ecstatic peace nevertheless requires the highest actualization of our own capacities and potential. It does not leave behind our own nature or destroy our own natures. It dignifies our nature beyond that which one could have ever thought possible absent illumination. Thus, St. Bonaventure in no way departs from his Aristotelian counterparts in thinking that human beings are designed for a flourishing by nature that is by definition the highest actualization of their being. He does, however, see a different content in analyzing eudaimonia, and because of its loftiness must also posit that divine aid assists us in moving towards and finally grasping that end.

2009-11-08T12:12:00.002-05:00

Words from Pope Benedict XVI:

What about today? What are you seeking? What is God whispering to you?
The hope which never disappoints in Jesus Christ. Nourished by personal prayer, prompted in silence, shaped by the Church's liturgy you will discover the particular vocation God has for you. Embrace it with joy.

2009-11-06T08:57:00.003-05:00

Being naturally gifted with strength, speed, or quick wit is not in itself virtuous, but we still praise those qualities. We do so because they bear a likeness to virtue, and they dispose those who posses them towards some good. Although everyone appreciates a good underdog story, or the can't-judge-a-book-by-its-cover story, or an ugly duckling story, the reality is that those endowed with superior qualities are indeed assisted by nature in their own personal development. To take an underdog story and suppose that its moral is that starting positions do not matter, that only hard work (or inner beauty, etc.) does matter, is to miss the point.

2009-11-04T14:16:00.002-05:00

I've been pondering this line from St. Thomas, found in the middle of his discussion on law:

Man has a natural aptitude for virtue, but the perfection of virtue must be acquired by man by means of some kind of training. Thus we observe that man is helped by industry in his necessities, for instance, in food and clothing. Certain beginnings of these he has from nature (e.g., his reason and his hands), but he has not the full complement, as other animals do . . . Now, it is difficult to see how man could suffice for himself in the matter of this training, since the perfection of virtue consists chiefly in withdrawing man from undue pleasures, to which, above all, man is inclined, and especially the young, who are more capable of being trained.

2009-10-30T10:32:00.002-04:00

No one is a Platonist any more, yet Plato is widely considered to be the greatest of philosophers. This phenomenon could never happen in the lower (e.g., physical or biological) sciences or in the higher (e.g., a prophet) sciences qua their proper operation. A biologist who is not also a philosopher will be discarded over time, and prophets do not live piecemeal through their adherents. Even many philosophers are discarded when they grasp positions too firmly, at the expense of their method. In this way, well-exercised reason appears to make contact with the eternal and divine.

Change and order

2009-10-26T12:22:00.000-04:00

In virtue of being human, human beings act purposefully, towards definite ends, and we deliberate between and use definite means for achieving these ends. We do not have certainty in that which we choose as means; we also do not always know entirely the end towards which we aim.

In an abstract sense, however, we can label the end towards which everyone aims as happiness (that is, eudaimona, or 'maximal-fulfillment-of-preferences,' or something like that).

The fact that we aim towards any ends at all implies that there is something which is an ultimate end. Why? Otherwise, how else could one adjudicate between competing ends? For any pair of competing ends vying for one's attention, there must be some third end which is of higher importance than either of the competing ends considered in themselves. One chooses between the competing ends based on which is perceived to be more compatible with one's greater end. And so on, leading not to an infinite regression but rather to some final end towards which every person aims: their own happiness.

Effectively moving towards one's ends requires ordered activity. The universe as it appears to us is ordered in its own, awe-inspiring way, but is often rather unordered relative to our own ends. We must therefore engage in activity to order ourselves and our surroundings, all the while respecting and heeding the order we find in the universe itself. (Man thus finds himself in an odd position. He must apply his labor to his surroundings to change them if he is at all to be happy. Nevertheless, even in the changing, he must carefully observe and work under the strict laws guiding the ongoing processes of the universe.)

Ordering requires intellectual cognition and abstraction. Aquinas glosses on Aristotle by noting that "it is the business of the wise man to order." I read this much like I read C.S. Lewis's statement that "joy is the serious business of heaven." Deliberation is the characteristic of all human beings. Well-orderedness is said to be the characteristic of the wise man.

Polemical aphorisms

2009-10-26T10:44:00.004-04:00

If you despise excessive profits, then you should favor free-market policies. The market is always driving profits towards zero. Where profits are increasing rapidly — especially where this increase appears to come at the expense of others — there is always a legally enforced privilege lurking. Big business knows this, and is consistently in favor of the very political policies that many believe are designed to help the poor contra big business. This deception is their great advantage.

If you despise poverty and wish to help the poor, then you should favor free-market policies. The poor are not helped by "trickle-down" anything or primarily through charity — this is a contemporary straw man that both left and right embrace, and they embrace it for different and respectively wrong reasons. The market is always driving profits towards zero. But where profits decrease most rapidly, the just distribution of goods towards their most urgent use is taking place most rapidly. The only way to effectively assist the poor is to ensure such processes can take place unimpeded.

Profits are the difference between most people's expectations and the way things are in reality. Entrepreneurs perceive this before others, and work to close the gap first. By shifting goods from less urgent to more urgent uses, they quite literally are working themselves out of a job. Yet in so doing, they are serving a key social function: making the best things more widely available, with better quality, at lower costs.

Often times people think of profits as a kind of theft taken either from producers or consumers, to the gain of a lazy middle-man. From the above, the response to such an objection ought to be clear.

Often times people think of profits as a just payout that starts small and increases forever and ever as a reward for previous hard work. I put in 90 hours a week now, and starting five years from now (and for the rest of my life) I can live off of the fruits of that labor. If I work hard and discover a new kind of medicine first, then I deserve a piece of the profits gained by anyone who makes this medicine throughout the rest of human history. Yet this outlook, an entitlement ethos, overlooks the true end of entrepreneurship: the movement of goods from less urgent uses to more urgent uses. Profit is a derrivative of this; it is not the end.

A great historical example is to be found in the history of book production.

A man born in 1453, the year of the fall of Constantinople, could look back from his fiftieth year on a lifetime in which about eight million books had been printed, more perhaps than all the scribes of Europe had produced since Constantine founded his city in A.D. 336.

The spread of books even to the poor was unimaginable before the printing press. After the invention of the printing press, it was fought against, tooth and nail — through the law — by the established families. Big business has always sought special privileges. One of the characteristics of a free market is that it removes profits from specific activities over the long run. The only way to slow down this process is through legally granted protections for acting out of concert with reality. Hence, freedom — liberty — is the only tool against this problem.

Some Words from Saint Bonaventure

2009-10-10T11:42:00.003-04:00

From The Journey of the Mind to God:

In the beginning I call upon that First Beginning from whom all illumination flows as from the God of lights, and from whom comes every good and perfect gift. I call upon the eternal Father through the divine Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, that through the intercession of the most holy virgin Mary, the mother of that same Lord and God, Jesus Christ, and through the intercession of blessed Francis [St. Bonaventure was a member of the Franciscan order], our leader and father, God might grant enlightenment to the eyes of our mind and guidance to our feet on the path of peace — that peace which surpasses all understanding. This is the peace which our Lord Jesus Christ proclaimed and granted to us. It was this message of peace which our father Francis announced over and over, proclaiming it at the beginning and the end of his sermons. Every greeting of his became a wish for peace; and in every experience of contemplation he sighed for an ecstatic peace. He was like a citizen of that Jerusalem about which the man of peace — he who was peaceable even with those who despised peace — says: Pray for those things that are for the peace of Jerusalem. For he knew that it is only in peace that the throne of Solomon exists, since it is written: His place is in peace and his dwelling is in Sion.

Since happiness is nothing other than the enjoyment of the highest good, and since the highest good is above us, we cannot find happiness without rising above ourselves, not by a bodily ascent, but by an ascent of the heart. But we cannot be elevated above ourselves unless a superior power lift us up. No matter how well-ordered the steps of our interior life may be, nothing will happen if the divine aid does not accompany us. But divine aid comes to those who pray from their heart humbly and devoutly. We just sigh for it through fervent prayer in this valley of tears. Therefore prayer is the mother and the origin of the upward movement of the soul. It is for this reason that Dionysius, at the beginning of his book Mystical Theology, wishing to instruct us on the matter of spiritual ecstasy, offers a prayer: Let us therefore, pray and say to the Lord our God: Lead me, O Lord, in your way so that I might enter into your truth. Let me heart rejoice that it may be in awe of your name.

When we pray in this way we are given the light to recognize the steps of the ascent to God. For it is in harmony with our created condition that the universe itself might serve as a ladder by which we can ascend into God. . . . We must pass beyond to that which is eternal, most spiritual, and above us by raising our eyes to the First Principle. And this will bring us to rejoice in the knowledge of God and to stand in awe before God's majesty.

And from Disputed Questions on the Knowledge of Christ:

In brief, it must be admitted that the divine being knows an infinite number of things. And these things are known, I say, through the divine being itself and not through a likeness; not through a likeness received from outside, but by means of truth itself which, as the exemplar of all, expresses all things. . . . Neither the soul of Christ nor any other soul can have comprehensive knowledge of the eternal Word or of the infinite number of knowable objects, even though the soul may be drawn to them in ecstasy. And, indeed, this ecstasy is that ultimate and most exalted form of knowledge which is praised by Dionysius in all his books . . . Practically the whole of sacred Scripture speaks symbolically of this type of knowledge. And in reference to it, the second chapter of Revelation says: "I shall give him a white stone, and on the stone will be written a new name which no one knows except the one who receives it." This type of knowledge can be understood only with great difficulty, and it cannot be understood at all except by one who has experienced it. And no one will experience it except one who is "rooted and grounded in love so as to comprehend with all the saints what is the length, and the breadth," etc. It is in this that true, experiential wisdom consists. It begins on earth and is consummated in heaven. In trying to explain this, negations are more appropriate than affirmations, and superlatives are more appropriate than positive predications. And if it is to be experienced, interior silence is more helpful than external speech. Therefore, let us stop speaking, and let us pray to the Lord that we may be granted the experience of that about which we have spoken.

It all depends on what is the philosophy of light

2009-10-05T11:19:00.002-04:00

G. K. Chesterton wrote this about reasonable discourse in general, but it strikes me that this is essentially what it feels like to be an Austrian economist in America:

Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good—” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.

Just war and the common good

2009-09-27T12:31:00.004-04:00

The standards of a just war are so high that they have been effectively abandoned by most countries in most war-threatening situations of the 20th and 21st centuries. Part of the problem is that the principles of just war are themselves seen as regulatory rather than as constitutive.

If we think that X, Y, and Z are good for a country, then there may be situations in which war appears to be necessary. One way of looking at the principles of just war — what I've termed the regulatory view — goes like this: Well, we know that we need X, Y, and Z; war is required in order to uphold X; therefore, just war theory should tell us about how to achieve X through war in the right way.

But notice how much of an after-effect just war principles are in this case. We already know that X is a must, and we have decided that war is the way to achieve it. Since both of these are the case prior to any considerations of a just war, they will be necessity rank as higher priorities than the just war itself. Any conflicts between the principles of just war and X (and the necessary war to uphold X) have already been decided. The principles of a just war will be tossed out, because upholding them in the face of losing X, Y, and Z is seen as the same thing as giving up and X, Y, and Z. But if X, Y, and Z just are what a country needs, it's difficult to see how just war considerations will prevail.

One is left only with a weak-kneed argument about the need to uphold moral duties even if the situation looks grim. These moralizers are always tossed out of the debate.

Suppose that the war a country wishes to pursue will — as a necessary component of the war — inflict heavy innocent civilian casualties. This is a clear violation of just war principles. But arguing against the war on the "back end" — that is, after conceding that the war is being conducted for the sake of X, Y, and Z and that X, Y, and Z are good for the country — is a strategy that will never work. One is a day late and a dollar short.

So much for the regulatory view. The constitutive view of just war takes a fundamentally different approach to war and the understanding of what is good for a country. As the term implies, just war is viewed as one of the components of what makes a good country.

The regulatory view I defined above sees a country's needs as X, Y, and Z, with the possibility of a given war, and thus just war theory as a possible guide for conduct in a necessary war. The constitutive view, by contrast, sees just war theory as one of the X, Y, and Z components themselves.

In other words, we can know a priori that an unjust war cannot be justified as a means for supporting X, Y, and Z simply because one of the components of X, Y, and Z just is that the principles of just war must be observed.

Holding this view prioritizes just war above wars themselves, whereas the regulatory view places just war considerations after war in terms of priority. This means that any conflicts between a particular war and just war theory has already been decided: no unjust war can in fact contribute to a good greater than what would be obtained by holding strictly to just war theory.

A related argument may be made in support of never using torture, either on civilians or on enemies. These are not dry, Kantian universals at work, where moral duty must be upheld with dogmatic acceptance. These are flesh-and-blood, organic principles of Aristotelian origin which apply to us today, as reasoning and thinking human beings.

2009-09-25T10:27:00.003-04:00

"The peace of all things is the tranquility of order." - Augustine, City of God, bkXIX ch13

God and evil

2009-09-19T11:28:00.002-04:00

A paraphrase of some thoughts I heard at a lecture yesterday:

Q. Does God allow evil? If so, why?

God does allow evil.

Why. It is difficult to say.

God does draw good out of evil. But this cannot be understood as an explanation for why God allows evil. Were we to say that God allows evil in order to bring about good, we would be claiming that God uses evil instrumentally for his purposes. This is something we may not assert.

So what are we left with? God allows evil . . . and — not "because" and not "in order to," but "and" — God allows evil, and God draws good even from the evil which he allows.

To explain that we live in a 'best possible' world, where the evils allowed are minimal or somehow constitute a greater good, we would have to have some kind of experience with other worlds. We would have to know alternate realities and achieve a God's-eye perspective on things.

Yet this is impossible. We are thus left with an inability to judge the overall worth-it-ness of our world. But we can know that we are the objects of God's will, of God's love. This allows us to make sense of the evil in the world, from which God is drawing much good, in keeping with his nature.

2009-09-09T09:05:00.001-04:00

Natural law relies on the assumption of a telos, and always with the end of human flourishing (eudaimonia, happiness) in mind. Starting with Machiavelli and Hobbes, ontology is rejected in favor of hierarchy, flourishing with the will, teleology with top-down order. The Hobbesian fear of a consistent underproduction of security services must override concerns of natural order. Indeed, the natural order is precisely what Hobbes says he wants to disrupt.

The Activity of Transcendence

2009-08-31T11:38:00.004-04:00

When Plato wrote, one of his greatest concerns was the prevalence of sophistry over truth-seeking. It is a popular argument to say that "in our own times, I fear that we are increasingly", etc., moving toward a society of rhetoric, away from truth seeking. But when exactly was this golden age of reason? It always appears to be just one or two generations back, for whichever generation one happens to be in.

Plotinus quotes a Greek poet approvingly, saying "men are not as they were of old."

To some extent, we are all like Boethius: trapped on our own, deprived of the better days, and trying to make sense of things. What lady philosophy provided Boethius wasn't the answer to his questions about the meaning of life. To give an ad hoc response to his suffering, placing it in context, would do nothing for us readers today. Instead, the path she leads him on, to the activity of philosophy, is the answer and escape from his trial. Boethius goes to his death contemplating the nature of God, the position of man, and the meaning of life.

This transcendence through philosophy is both a means of escape and a means of dealing with the world around us. Escape itself is a dead end, as would be the kind of 'heaven' that Socrates imagined: being able to engage his betters in the dialectic for all eternity. The activity is noble but its end is greater. The ends in question are also how we can tell the difference between philosophy and sophistry.

If our aim and activity is the reasoned life well lived, then one of the primary problems we face is sorting out real concerns from the sophistry of today. The wisdom of the Stoics can help one to transcend whatever petty arguments dominate contemporary discourse. (It's a pretty good start to assume that most of what most people talk about misses the point and/or is sophistry — though this isn't an absolute rule.) I'm thinking in particular of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. (Plotinus as well, although it takes a lot of work to read him, and I don't think I could have done it apart from the discussion group I was participating in.) They are a moving and inspiring practical guide, even if they have their flaws.

2009-08-18T10:29:00.002-04:00

I'm becoming convinced that Aquinas believes we live in a determinist universe. What would it mean to live in a world where one could change the future? The future is simply "that which will happen." It's incoherent to think about changing that.

All form determines; matter considered absolutely is indeterminate, and substratum doesn't exist. Therefore, any thing that one encounters, to the extent that it is, is determined. And human beings, being themselves proximate causes, determine many things for themselves. Free yet determined, but not in the compatibilist sense. (Or, at least, I think not in the compatibilist sense.)

2009-08-18T08:48:00.002-04:00

Our passions, emotions, and imagination drive the activity of the intellect in a real way. They are the wood that keeps the fire blazing. To live without feeling is to have no thoughts.

Evidential arguments for existence

2009-08-14T08:08:00.002-04:00

I think Descartes' "cogito ergo sum" works as an argument, but not in the way he meant it or for the same reasons. The cogito is a fine choice for his premise, but so also would have been amo (I love, therefore I am) or sentio (I feel, therefore I am) or surrido (I smile, therefore I am).

Descartes was looking for the undoubtable foundation, and in that project he fails. But this doesn't rule out the argument that, given data X, conclusion Y seems most warranted. And in that sense, the cogito works, just as I think Plantiga's half-facetious argument, "6+7=13; therefore, God exists," works. For the the philosophical skeptic who thinks there can be no bridge between things and therefore no proof of one thing by way of another, there is no real answer.

One Above the Partial

2009-08-06T21:55:00.003-04:00

Adler writes about Aristotle's Ethics,

The Ethics is about many things: happiness, habit, virtue, pleasure, and so forth—the list could be very long. But the controlling insight is discovered only by the very careful reader. This is the insight that happiness is the whole of the good, not the highest good, for in that case it would be only one good among others. Recognizing this, we see that happiness does not consist in self-perfection, or the goods of self-improvement, even though these constitute the highest among partial goods. Happiness, as Aristotle says, is the quality of a whole life, and he means "whole" not only in a temporal sense but also in terms of all the aspects from which a life can be viewed. The happy man is one . . . who puts it all together — and keeps it there throughout his life.

Ludwig von Mises held that all men act for the sake of eudaimonia; this was for him a given and unquestionable starting point for economics. But he denied that one could say much scientifically regarding the content of that happiness; and one of the consequences of this is that one man cannot possibly say to another what might make him happy. Instead, one can only project one's own understanding (Mises: "the critic . . . tells us what he believes he would aim at if he were in the place of his fellow") onto the situation of another.

But Aristotle thinks that, given the fact that we are all (in one sense) the same thing, it is possible to make statements that will be true of both of us. Mises agrees with this in some limited way — which is why he grants that all act for the sake of happiness — but wants to deny any further content beyond the given. Aristotle's Ethics are his attempt at providing this content in a scientific (i.e., systematic) way.

Hence, not only is happiness more than the sum of its parts — viz., the whole life of partial goods as mentioned above, not just one good among many — but contra Mises it can be understood using the discipline of science.

2009-08-05T15:42:00.002-04:00

Socrates would have made a terrible professor at a research university. He would undoubtedly have been denied tenure for his lack of publications, but even his own refusal to specialize in some second-order subfield of narrow studies would have kept him away. St. Thomas would have made — and in fact was — a great professor at a major research university.

Yet both can be considered paradigms of the philosopher, of the examined life well-lived. There is a sense in which ultimate happiness may be obtained by pursuing one of many paths, just as one can either take a car or walk to a nearby destination. This presumes the destination is the same, of course: happiness itself is not in the eye of the beholder. A virtuous person can make use of many means precisely because the end is so firmly fixed in her understanding.

2009-07-22T13:44:00.002-04:00

A certain law professor, who fancies himself a philosopher, makes excessive use of the term "helpful" and its synonym "useful." Everything is either "helpful" or "unhelpful," and resources are always (if good) "useful." It is as though the minimal and greatest thing someone can do for me is to be of use.

I suppose when one lives in a world, as he does, of utmost cynicism, narcissism, and nihilism, there is no sense of the good / bad / virtuous / desirable / noble / ignoble / etc. There is only that which is expedient and that which is inexpedient.

Causes and means

2009-07-12T08:08:00.003-04:00

God loves to work through intermediaries and media. Rarely does any Christian speak of the grace of God absent some medium through which that grace was conveyed. He could, had he wished, kept our planet warm and given plants and animals something like sunlight by divine decree. Instead, he created the sun. We say that the sun warms the Earth, but those who believe in God also give credit to his provision. Not that God's provision, as a concept, removes the sun from the picutre: rather, the sun just is his means of providence.

God's involvement through his media is itself a rejection of the an ancient heresy: namely, the Arian doctrine that intermediaries had to create the world, as God is too transcendent to do so himself. (It would be 'dirtying his hands' to do so.) The Arian belief has its roots in a kind of Gnosticism, which held that God created Christ, who created other beings (and so on, A, B, C . . . Z) until the world was made. This view—essentially, a form of deism—is rejected in the language of the Nicene Creed when it asserts that Christ is God, not just God's firstborn of all creation. Christians thus affirm that God himself created the world, even the seemingly lowest of things (through him "all things were made").

If Arianism is rejected for its deism, then many of the Protestant, "low-church" views on the Sacraments are rejected by the historical church for their occasionalism. Occasionalism is the view espoused by certain medieval physicists, who held that for any natural phenomenon P, God was its immediate and only cause. (Drop a pencil on the ground? God causes it to fall. It rains? That's God sending the water down. Etc.) The "low-church" view of Sacramnts holds that God does not work salvation through any means or mediaries in any sense, save the work of Christ. In this view, any medium through which God communicates the grace of Christ is a barrier, not a sacrament. Yet, this is akin to thinking that nothing in the universe happens via physical laws; that, just as God created the world by an act of his own, so also do the planets revolve around stars and rocks fall to the ground through an act of God alone.

The fear is that one will attribute the grace to the sacrament in place of God, just as some feared that physical laws removed God from our narrative of the physical sciences. However, there is an overlooked third way in both cases. One can believe that God causes planets to exist and have the nature that they do, and also affirm that planets revolve around the sun because of gravity (and other physical laws) . And so one may also credit the work of Jesus Christ as entirely sufficient for the salvation of men, yet also hold that God has chosen to work that salvation through further, specific means. E.g., through bread, wine, water, and oil.

Questions, coherent and incoherent

2009-06-21T23:19:00.003-04:00

Take the assertion "rational people question their beliefs from time to time." There are two kinds of coherent "questioning," and one incoherent kind of questioning, that are often implemented. The two coherent lines of questioning are indispensable in day-to-day life, and go something like this: one can question one's foundations, or one can grant the foundations and question some matter of internal structure (or, "superstructure").

For example, as Christians one can discuss a very wide range of things pertaining to the daily practice of one's faith. One need not even be a Christian to participate, as long as the basic assumptions are granted. This is one kind of conversation about Christianity one can have—it examines the superstructure, given the assumptions. We need to be able to have these conversations sometimes, or else we'd never do anything productive.

But one may—and ought—also to ask whether the foundations of Christianity are true, regardless of whichever superstructure one will think later on. Is there a God? Why should we think he / she / it is interested in us? And so on.

Both of these are productive and healthy activities. The incoherent version of 'critical thinking' in this case is the thought process that attempts to borrow something from each line of questioning given above. Yet, it ends up with the worst of both worlds, and a tool that is impossible to implement: it wants to retain the superstructure of a set of beliefs but question the foundation.

I have seen this in recent years with an author who, qua his Christianity, wishes to critically question dogmas of faith. That is, to claim commitments to the superstructure of Christianity while examining, and perhaps even discarding, many of the granted assumptions.

I'm not saying don't question those assumptions. By all means, look at them with sharp eyes. Throw out what's bad, keep what's good. But this is a meta-task that requires meta-tools. Even the most ardent skeptic must practice a coherent skepticism. The ethos of being a Christian is incompatible with rejecting its granted assumptions. At that point you just have to be something else. (In short, there is nothing more pure about a Christianity that wants to be Christian without admitting its inextricable relationship to orthodoxy.)

Christianity is the easy example (I even wanted to avoid it for the extra baggage it brings), but there are many more issues of contention that immediately come to mind. The examples can be as banal as 'that in virtue of which a fan [of a sports team] is said to be a fan' and can be as complex as extended issues concerning the virtue ethics of Aristotle.

The ethos of the incoherent questioner is typically used for rhetorical posturing, because it looks an awful lot like the honest skeptic. But there is an important difference in kind at play.

Excellence and virtue

2009-06-16T22:10:00.002-04:00

A common archetype in literature is the unassuming, otherwise innocent character who, through the coincidence of living in certain times or in a certain place, is called to do great things. The common man, woman, or child (or hobbit!), who rises to the task at hand and does something entirely extraordinary. We see this both in protagonists and in the occasional expert who lends a helping hand to some great task.

What is interesting is that we most often aspire to be like the protagonist with respect to their heroic performance of the task, or their epic ability to rise above their common status. In many cases, however, what has made the protagonist worthy of such a task was precisely their life of obscurity—insofar as it was an obscure life well lived. Excellence and virtue came from their otherwise boring existence; perhaps through mundane tasks like keeping a clean house, personal study, or working hard in their meaningless job. They do not maintain excellence and virtue to perform some great task, but because doing so in worthwhile in its own right.

Many times, epic success or the opportunity to do some great thing is simply the gift of fortune. What can be controlled and mastered is rather domestic, comparatively bland, and tied down to all kinds of historical accidents we have no control over (e.g., being born and raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. during the 21st century versus living as a Yorkshire farmer in the 13th century).

Cars and philosophy

2009-06-14T13:45:00.003-04:00

Is it more fundamental to the activity of driving to drive your car to the store, or to know how the car works before stepping inside of the vehicle?

If you insist on resting assured that every last inch of the car has been inspected, analyzed, and certified in working condition before turning the key, you might easily spend an entire lifetime studying the car without ever driving it.

Or, you could get in, turn the key, and (amazingly!) do what you wanted to do fairly reliably. Do I know the relationship between every last gear, crank, and belt? No. Does it really matter, as far as driving is concerned?

"Of course it does!" says the car-study advocate. "After all, how can you drive the car if you don't even know how the car works?"

Well, I'll tell you. You get in, turn the key, buckle your safety belt, put it into gear, and go! That's what I call "driving."

The car-studier might object that there is great wonder in studying the car. They might say that real "driving" is the never-ending quest to slow things down and really notice what's going on in the car. And indeed there is great wonder to it. That there are metal parts which move and work together in such harmony is awe-inspiring.

But forgive me if I call the trip to the store, and not the car-studying, "driving."

Potential Analogy

2009-06-12T22:43:00.002-04:00

I suspect there is a relevant analogy between the "problem" of free will and God's knowledge on the one hand, and the existence of privation and an eternal being on the other. It goes something like this.

1. Free choice and the will

One of the central questions in understanding free will is to ask "who determines outcome X?" God causes all things to have being and act insofar as they have it, and his knowledge is the cause of their existence (ST I.Q14.a8). He even moves the will of men to choose, but in a real way men exercise a free choice. So at some point there is a determination or causation that arises from God's effects.

(Resolving the causes involved here isn't the biggest issue. If A causes B and B causes C, you can have your cake and eat it too: both A and B cause C. B is the proximate cause, and it can be considered a real cause even if A begins the chain.)

2. Being and privation

God is perfect act; his existence is his essence. Any effect of God will necessarily have, objectively, less being. This doesn't mean that God's effects can't nevertheless be perfect: perfection just has to be understood in its correct context. (The perfect bowl of pasta may rightly be called perfect even if it is no good at sending e-mails.)

Yet not all of God's effects achieve perfection in their own mode of existence. Some dogs are born with three legs; people do evil things; etc. If God is perfect, and a perfect cause causes lots of effects, where does the privation come from? What is its source?

(There is a difficulty in that privations aren't properly called 'things.' There is no such thing as blindness; convention lets us put a label on what should-be-there-but-isn't. But I think it might be possible to phrase this question in such a way that this can be avoided.)

De Anima

2009-06-05T18:32:00.004-04:00

There are two primary words for "soul" in Latin: animus and anima. As far as I am aware, animus communicates "soul" in the sense it is often used in common conversation. Someone's soul is an entity that is numerically identical with the person; it floats around and, for the duration of this life, is encased by the body; etc.

But anima gives a much barer sense of "soul," as its primary meaning is 'animate; give/bring life; revive, refresh; rouse.' And this is the term that is utilized by the Aristotelian tradition: that which animates; that which gives life, form, order; that in virtue of which the thing is what it is. It explains, in part, the reason why Aristotelians thing bodies are essential for human existence.

It was also the term chosen by St. Jerome to translate Mary's Magnificat: "Magnificat anima mea Domino. . ." [My soul magnifies the Lord. . .]

Equality and the Law

2009-06-03T21:48:00.003-04:00

According to the moral law, one who brings charges against one's neighbor—in the event that such charges go unproven—is liable for penalties. In some instances, the same punishments they sought to impose on the accused are placed on them. There is a kind of harshness to natural law, in that no one is excepted. If I detain you under certain suspicions, which prove to be false, I have aggressed against you and need to make restitution.

You have to pause and think about this principle, and its implications, to realize just how radical it is.

Those who deride medieval philosophers for thinking that kings ruled by divine right ought to keep this in mind. Which is worse: (1) To think a man is made to rule by God, but that this same man falls under the moral law of nature just as you and I do, or (2) To pretend that those "in charge", the police, prosecutors, and others who execute the law are just men like you and I, but are nevertheless exempt from what the moral law requires?

Realism

2009-05-31T23:47:00.004-04:00

Philosophical realism both justifies, and is justified by, ordinary judgments—one could even call them 'common sense' judgments. Skepticism can arise from both ends. One can attempt skepticism by doubting the reality, accuracy, or usefulness of ordinary perceptions. One can also be skeptical regarding the rigor (more accurately, the alleged lack thereof) of philosophy that is based on common and ordinary perceptions.

Each version skepticism is best defended against by the partner of the claim under attack. Those doubting the reality of ordinary perceptions may be met by a strong philosophical case for them. Those doubting the foundation or sufficiency of realist philosophy may be met by the simple argument "here is one hand, here is another; there must be an external world."

On megachurches

2009-05-31T01:18:00.003-04:00

I once knew someone who maintained that a certain form of worship in church was the most desirable because, as Paul wrote, we need spiritual milk before we can move on to spiritual meat. When this line of thinking is given a kind of universality, it is its own undoing.

The wise person is said to be he/she who orders well precisely because being/act as such is good, yet not every good is good in every application. Making the general principle ('goodness') into an application in and of itself, without adapting to any of the circumstances of the particular situation at hand, pervert the goodness that is there in principle. In practice this means that the lowest common denominator—that which is bland, unhelpful, appealing to unthinking masses, etc.—tends to win out.

Means and Ends

2009-05-28T23:13:00.002-04:00

Means may serve a variety of ends. That means are arranged toward a particular end is the product of ordering, and all ordering is the product of an intellect. Means are the ordering by a rational being, for the sake of achieving an end. The wise person can more easily render his or her circumstances—whatever they may be—towards his or her end because they are more skilled in the art of ordering.

(Side note: The ends don't justify the means, not because some noble ends aren't worth horrific means, but because there are no noble ends served by horrific means. A factual, literal rendering would ruin the proverb, but it conveys the truth a little more plainly: There are no ends such that they require evil means. Those who think they are aiming at noble ends with evil means have failed in the art of measuring.)

The ordering of circumstance by wise persons can take many forms. Two examples come to mind. Sometimes wise men make use of seemingly every accident at their disposal to effect their end (to use the funny example, think MacGyver). At other times wise men appear to ignore every external thing as they focus on their end with incredible energy (to use the stereotype, think of the Eastern sage in meditation). God uses both methods. Sometimes he orders every little detail in such a way that our needs are miraculously provided for. Other times he remains in the shadows, obscured by the details of life should we allow him to be. There are many kinds of ordering.

On Performative Contradctions

2009-05-27T18:06:00.002-04:00

The word bombastic (and any of its impressive-sounding synonyms) must in most cases be used with some degree of irony. Since the word does not enjoy common use, I may easily appear to be violating my own standards should I condemn someone as "bombastic" for using lofty language. The irony here stems from the notion of a performative contradiction: supporting an idea in such a way that it contradicts the means with which I do it.

In this sense, the basic assertions of human action remain impervious to reasoned attacks from human beings. To do so would be to say "this human being acts to voice the opinion that human beings do not act." (An alternative would be to program a computer to "say" it, or take drugs that cause one to mouth and breathe the words. But neither of these could be seen as voicing an opinion; at most they are mere configurations that are interpreted by an actor, and so on.)

2009-05-25T20:42:00.005-04:00

All activity aims at an ends, and utilizes means to achieve that end. Some means are used solely for the sake of arriving at the end. Other means are constituent pieces of the ends themselves. Playing certain notes in a certain order is how I can enact my end of playing Comptine D'autre, but the means themselves aren't solely instrumental, since my end is to do just that: play the piece! (Piano lessons to acquire the ability to learn the piece is an example of instrumental means, in this case, or something that is "disposed" once its purpose is served.)

The end of human existence is an activity. We do not "get there" and cease; in fact, our activity in its fullest fulfilment is by definition more act than anything else we can do. This is why the actualization of an end is also called perfection, and why perfection does not entail stasis.

Free preference

2009-05-25T00:09:00.002-04:00

William James notes that human beings solidify their character by the age of 20 and their work habits by the age of 30. Aristotle estimated that the window for character development closed around the age of 20. Free choice does not occur in the abstract but flows from a soul which has been habituated.

The idea of free will as we often discuss it rarely comes up in Aristotle. He was more concerned with the preferences people have. Yes, they have freedom in forming and changing them, but preferences have their effects and most of what we do each day relies on the framework of preference we have built for ourselves. This may be one of the easiest principles to gather empirical evidence for.

That's not to say a defender of the notion of a libertarian free will cannot be an Aristotelian. Quite the contrary: it would rob free will of any meaning should our choices have no impact on future ones. If I truly decide today that I want to lose 40 pounds by this time next year (i.e., I begin to act on that desire), and if such a decision is truly a meaningful one, it should impact not only what I do in this moment but have a rippling effect on my future decisions. One can change one's course, but this presupposes that one has a particular course to change.

2009-05-23T17:41:00.003-04:00

St. Thomas states in the beginning of the Summa Theologica that it is written for beginners. There are two levels of misinterpretation possible with that designation.

First, and this is well known, when St. Thomas said "beginners" he had in mind students of philosophy and theology who had spent the last two years of their lives immersed in Aristotle. That would be the equivalent of a student with an MA in ancient philosophy today 'beginning' work in theology, above and beyond the catechesis of their youth and the many years each had already spent reading and contemplating the scriptures. This is the first misinterpretation.

The second arises because a work for "beginners" can be understood in two ways.

The first way, and I do not think Aquinas had this in mind, is the presentation of material that is watered-down, perhaps not entirely accurate (and certainly not precise), or otherwise pared down to only a few parts so that even an uninitiated person might read and understand it without further intellectual work on their part. Think childrens' books here.

Second, and this is the sense with which I am concerned (and, I would argue, St. Thomas was concerned), it can be said to be "for beginners" in the sense that the principles laid out and arguments made are the important ones to consider. They are not "watered down", it is simply that what is most essential is presented. And essential ideas can be grasped by almost anyone willing to give a degree of effort.

I once had a teacher who lamented the state of Christianity because a certain catechism (one of the Reformed ones) stated that it was for the education of children and the slow-of-learning, but the text was consistently used in seminary education. (Presumably they should have mastered the material and have been spending their seminary years in more advanced thought.) But I think this mistakes the second sense of "beginner" that I have presented with the first sense. Any important truth worth contemplating may be stated in succinct form and in plain language, such that even a child could memorize the words and even begin to see the sense behind the terms. The text then serves as the platform for the more learned to make their contributions and discoveries, whether in writing or in conversation.

In the case of St. Thomas' treatise, it takes an educated person (especially with some background in Aristotle) to work through it at all, but it also remains a text for "beginners" in the sense that much of the flesh for the bones has been left out, and no 'fat' whatsoever was included. What amazes me in reading the Summa Theologica is that he nevertheless gets to the heart of the matter and treats of it sufficiently for the task at hand. Some who turn to the ST for answers will take a good deal of it on authority, others along with skeptics or 'outsiders' will at least see the direction that he is coming from and the direction that he is going, for those few who search it out an invaluable and near-inexhaustible edifice awaits one's curiosity and efforts.

No text can contain a finality of answers, not because there is no end to inquiry, but because to suppose such an end ought to occur within a text is to confuse the means with the end. Texts are a piece of the activity, and rational activity cannot be shut down in spite of itself in order to achieve its proper end.

2009-05-23T16:06:00.002-04:00

That grace perfects a nature and does not destroy (or replace) it is crucial for understanding Christianity. It makes the difference between God saving me and God saving nothing or something else.

Art

2009-05-23T12:46:00.005-04:00

Teleology is discovered in metaphysics (and its subcategories, such as praxeology, which I am so fond of) and applied in the arts. Whether it be the mechanical arts, plays, poetry, painting, writing, or even sports, aesthetics can, and should, be seen as a kind of ordering, inspired by the order we observe in the universe. Without ends there is no relative position.

"It is the business of the wise man to order." Wise men order many things from few principles. From the higher causes comes a great and beautiful diversity. From a great diversity, a beginner can move from what is more easily known to what is more (and most) knowable.

Some Creation Questions

2009-05-22T22:27:00.000-04:00

I'll start with two assumptions which I don't care to discuss at this point and would rather simply grant that they are true:

(1) That the Christian narrative of God's interaction with the world (and man in particular) is true and that the tenets of orthodox Christian faith are true.
(2) That scientists and physicists have gathered a generally accurate picture of the history of the universe and the laws of physics, insofar as they've explicated them.

Given those assumptions, it appears as though the universe is approximately 14 billion years old and that something like human beings appeared on the scene around 150k-200k years ago. It also appears as though God created man in a special way anywhere from about 6k years ago to about 200k years ago.

Given the theological significance the scriptures attach to the one Adam / one Christ paradigm, is it necessary that Adam be understood as one man? The group "Adam" theory appears to me to have too many problems, so I'll assume that Adam was one man and Eve one woman.

If so, does Adam signify the first homo sapiens sapiens—that is, the first distinct 'human' as biology defines it? Or, does this signify one bald ape among many other bald apes whom God 'breathed' into, making him the first moral agent? Or, was Adam created by God on the spot as a human being, and if so are there relevant biological differences between he and the human-looking apes surrounding him at the time?

Are any of the other human-like species (Neanderthals, Flores, etc.) candidates for moral agency? If not, what is their relationship to modern humans in a theological context? Is it significant that they may have all died out before Adam's appearance on the scene? Were scientists to clone Neanderthals today, would we discover that they were/are persons, or were/are they only animals?

Clearly physical death was ubiquitous and prominent before the fall. Did God intend for Adam and Eve to live forever in that state? Was a change of body included in their "creation" if their creation was a kind of moral-agentizing? If not, was God planning on a supernatural intervention to keep them alive (e.g., the tree of life)? If the latter, would it have been a continuous intervention, or (again) a one-time change?

Entropy appears to be one of the principles by which the universe functions as it does. Presumably it was in action for the ~14 billion years before there were Adam and Eve. As such it appears to be an effect, not of sin, but of creation as God intended it. If so, then the physical universe appears headed for the cold death. Suppose for a moment that the fall never happened. Was God's intention to preserve Adam and Eve (and their offspring) from the cold death? By what mechanism? If by direct intervention, doesn't that appear somewhat counter-intuitive given the way God has typically chosen to work in creation?

Now take the universe as we have it. Suppose (from my question above) that the fall does describe the spiritual death that Adam and Eve—and the rest of us—experience, and that the physical universe is meanwhile doing more or less what it has always done. Would the 'new heavens' and 'new earth' introduce some cosmic change that would, e.g., suspend entropy? There seems to be an imbalance there (moral death followed by moral, physical, and cosmic reformation) that is a bit bothersome.

An infinite extension is impossible, as is an infinite number. (God is infinite, but in a different sense of the term.) What is everlasting life but the infinite extension of life? God lives eternally, i.e., in the simultaneous and whole possession of eternal life. But as finite beings tied essentially to matter (even post-resurrection), the prospect of life that ever extends introduces the problem of infinity. (Or, rather, there is a problem here that I cannot quite put my finger on but has me scratching my head from time to time.)

Some Christians posit that everlasting life will look something like societies built on Earth (and possibly other planets) with the sun ever burning with new fuel and things staying relatively the same. But unless God intervenes in the life of our sun, it will eventually begin to expand into a red giant, incinerating the Earth along the way—although long before that its increased heat will have boiled off the Earth's oceans and destroyed any life on the planet. (The same questions regarding entropy may be modified and place here.)

Sacraments

2009-05-22T12:28:00.004-04:00

If we were angels and/or essentially immaterial beings, it would not matter whether we were "tied" to a body or not, we would affect change in our being through immaterial causes—i.e., that which is essentially internal and non-physical. If we were but animals, there would be no immaterial being to alter above that which powered our sensitive capacities. Yet we are not reducible to either. We are immaterial beings capable of transcendent activity, and (not "but") we are tied essentially to the bodies that instantiate us.

That we learn first through the sensible and work our way to the intelligible is a great example of how physical changes incite our intellects to activity. Some set-apart physical spaces, items, and actions affect in us spiritual changes that cannot be had apart from union with the physical elements themselves. Disposing of all material for ostensibly spiritual reasons is a mistake in metaphysics. It removes the foundation of the building which has the desired superstructure, and brings us crashing to the ground.

Being at work staying itself

2009-05-21T17:28:00.005-04:00

It is possible to act in such a way that in one's very activity there is no change / movement. Ludwig von Mises' objection to the idea of God was that such a being would have no discomfort to move from, given its omnipotence. Acting would be superfluous, and therefore no acting God could exist (and, in his mind, therefore no God could exist). But this ignores the possibility of a being in act, whose act just is its essence. Such a being need not be in movement from one state to another, and yet to cease acting would certainly bring about its discomfort.

Joe Sachs translates this concept from Aristotle (I'm not sure which particular Greek word it is at the moment) "being-at-work-staying-itself."

2009-05-20T00:06:00.002-04:00

It is impossible to abandon the intellect when contemplating, and all meditation is a kind of contemplation. Emptying one's mind, or relaxing the body, etc. is a kind of pretext for meditation but not the meditation itself. Attaining to higher things, not lower, is the means to simplifying.

Understanding and Science

2009-05-19T23:52:00.002-04:00

According to Thomas Aquinas comprehension occurs when a knower attains to a thing in such a way that nothing of the thing is hidden from the knower. There is a lower degree (NB: not a different kind, just a different degree) of knowledge called understanding, whereby one attains to the intelligible species, or the principles underlying things. There is still a lower degree of knowledge called science, which is the activity of pursuing knowledge of conclusions derived from experience.

We approach comprehension through understanding, and understanding through science, and science through experience, and experience through sense data. The latter are what are more known to us, but the former are what he calls more knowable—for they contain everything that the latter manifest, as well as the reason why they manifest as they do.

Prime Matter and Determinacy

2009-05-14T17:55:00.002-04:00

When studying Aristotelian metaphysics one quickly learns that prime matter is completely in potency and not at all in act. But prime matter is just matter absent form; or, put alternatively, matter in its most "pure" state. The consequence of this is that matter is, fundamentally, indeterminate. Keeping this truth in mind alleviates many problems down the road.

"How can you think that a person's actions are free when they are determined by the chemical makeup of her brain and physical state?" Well, there is nothing intrinsic to the physical particles themselves which says they have to be in one location at one time and another location at another time. The specific organization of physical matter (in anything from planets to locusts to human beings) might, but this is simply to say that the matter is informed in a certain way.

All matter that we can sense / experience is determined, but that does not mean the principles causing the determination are themselves determined. So, if I decide to wave my arm up in the air, the matter constituting my arm is indeed being informed and the physical particles thus appear in a certain place at a certain time. But just what is it that is doing the informing? A rational being with capacities for free choice. The supposed incoherency disappears.

Human Action as Observable Order

2009-05-13T23:39:00.003-04:00

In St. Thomas Aquinas' commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, he gives the context for moral philosophy by observing that

Because the operation of reason is perfected by habit, according to the [four] different modes of order that reason considers in particular, a differentiation of sciences arises:
The function of natural philosophy is to consider the order of things that human reason considers but does not establish—understand that with natural philosophy here we also include metaphysics.
The order that reason makes in its own act of consideration pertains to rational philosophy (logic), which properly considers the order of the parts of verbal expression with one another and the order of principles to one another and to their conclusions.
The order of voluntary actions pertains to the consideration of moral philosophy.
The order that reason in planning establishes in external things arranged by human reason pertains to the mechanical arts.

Natural philosophy requires an intellect to observe the order of the world, with the understanding that the order 'out there' is fundamentally independent of the observer's activity. This is the speculative science. Its corresponding practical science is called by St. Thomas the "mechanical arts." Mechanical arts are simply the practical application in action of whatever one observes through natural philosophy. Consequently, everything that can be observed in natural philosophy has an implication for the mechanical arts.

St. Thomas identifies part of a second pairing of sciences, one speculative and the other practical. This pairing concerns the actions of moral agents—namely, human beings. He lists the practical science—ethics, and the subject of the work he is commenting on—but does not explicitly point to its partner.

What science of voluntary action "considers the order of things that human reason considers but does not establish"? It must be that which studies the conceptual truths of the fact of human action and everything this entails. It must leave aside the practice of such action—that is the domain of ethics, after all—and focus itself solely on the implications inherent in creatures capable of voluntary action.

What does that look like?

"Human action is defined simply as purposeful behavior. . .The purpose of a man’s act is his end; the desire to achieve this end is the man’s motive for instituting the action. All human beings act by virtue of their existence and their nature as human beings. We could not conceive of human beings who do not act purposefully, who have no ends in view that they desire and attempt to attain. . . .It is this fundamental truth—this axiom of human action—that forms the key to our study. The entire realm of praxeology and its best developed subdivision, economics, is based on an analysis of the necessary logical implications of this concept.

In order to institute action, it is not sufficient that the individual man have unachieved ends that he would like to fulfill. He must also expect that certain modes of behavior will enable him to attain his ends. A man may have a desire for sunshine, but if he realizes that he can do nothing to achieve it, he does not act on this desire. He must have certain ideas about how to achieve his ends. Action thus consists of the behavior of individuals directed towards ends in ways that they believe will accomplish their purpose. Action requires an image of a desired end and “technological ideas” or plans on how to arrive at this end." (Rothbard. Man, Economy, and State)

Etc. In short, it's praxeology: the study of action. Economics.

I think this is implicit in Aquinas' words here—even were he not to recognize it—in that he clearly thinks that "natural philosophy" covers both the physical and metaphysical sciences. Economics is thus in the realm of metaphysics, insofar as it considers the logical truths implied by voluntary action—without studying the practical ordering of those actions for individual actors.

Postmodern Hobbits

2009-05-12T08:53:00.000-04:00

In Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, one of the recurring themes is a monumental task given to an unassuming character, who is overwhelmed by what he/she must do. The character knows what must be done (there is one clear task in front of him/her) and knows that he/she must do it; the question on which the drama builds is how the character will find the courage to face what must be done.

If a similar epic was written today and reflected concerns for my generation, I wonder whether the conflict might look different in this way: I suspect that most characters would have the will to do some great thing, perhaps even the means (or the willingness to work with what they have); however, they would be greatly puzzled as to just what must be done, and they would have great doubts concerning which was the right thing to do among many things.

"Belief is fashioned over all things"

2009-05-10T12:11:00.000-04:00

Xenophanes was among the first of the Greek philosophers and, according to the ancient world, the father of philosophical skepticism. As with the other pre-Socratic philosophers, we have but fragments of his writings; however, among them is this gem:

…and of course the clear and certain truth no man has seen nor will there be anyone who knows about the gods and what I say about all things. For even if, in the best case, one happened to speak just of what has been brought to pass, still he himself would not know. But opinion is allotted to all.

Or, an alternative translation:

No man has seen nor will anyone know
the truth about god and the things I speak of.
For even if a man were to say something that was absolutely true,
still, he does not know,
But belief is fashioned over all things

There are two kinds of skepticism. One is the denial of a given statement and the presumption that it is "guilty until proven innocent." The other denies some principle of knowledge—for example, that knowledge can be derived from eye-witness testimony. Among the most fundamental skeptics are they that deny the possibility of arriving at any knowledge in principle, as Xenophanes does.

There are many shades of skeptic. One particular variety denies that knowledge is possible absent some leap of faith: fideism. "Belief is fashioned over all things." This leads Doug Wilson (an evangelical Christian and self-proclaimed 'pressuppositionalist') to claim in a recent debate that all positions are faith-based positions. He thinks this levels the playing field between a skeptical atheist, like his debate partner Christopher Hitchens, and a reformed theologian such as himself. (Extraordinarily, Hitchens agrees with Wilson on this point.) If both have taken leaps of faith to come to any knowledge, then they share a kind of equality and even unassailableness. The rest of the matter must be sorted out based on the conclusions and consequences of their beliefs, etc.

Francis Schaeffer takes a similar position in his own apologetics. It strikes me as an attempt (a failed attempt, perhaps, but an attempt nonetheless) to out-doubt the doubter. One sees the skeptic his watered-down position and raises the stakes to a complete epistemological framework built on doubt—with an escape hatch called faith.

Yet I think there is an ignored 'third way' here beyond fideistic theism and fideistic atheism. (Ironically, it gives the conclusions of both atheism and theism the room to exist rationally.) And that is realism in metaphysics and epistemology: or, the recognition that sense data gives us real information about the world and our reasoning capacities can sort, order, and identify truths.

This is not just another subset of fideistic claims, as a presuppositionalist might object, but an affirmation that knowledge outside of their paradigm is possible. People simply don't start with presuppositions and work out the implications in real life. That would be to start with what is most knowable (abstract principles) and work down towards particular data. People actually come to knowledge starting with what is most known to us (sense data) and abstracting from this to what is most knowable.

And if Christian theologians want their epistemology to stand, realism is in my view the better route than fideism. Otherwise, faith becomes the basis for reason, rather than being the thing that perfects it. It is rather like claiming that grace substitutes for a nature rather than perfecting it. The topic of a different blog post(s), perhaps, but the inevitable conclusion of accepting the skeptics' basis for challenging knowledge.

Five Beds for a House

2009-05-09T12:05:00.000-04:00

Aristotle has been lambasted by Murray Rothbard (and other, more fundamentally confused commentators) on the subject of money. However, several contributions made by Aristotle were overlooked in Rothbard's account.

They key to understanding Aristotle's somewhat tangential treatment of money in his Nicomachean Ethics V.5 is the context in which it happens: a discussion on justice, which for Aristotle denotes a kind of equality. And not just justice in the generic sense, but in an exploration of proportional justice—proper returns for prior action.

If I punch Kevin in the face, and our society was based on eye-for-an-eye principles, we might settle our differences with a returned punch-in-the-face from Kevin to me. It wouldn't even have to be in the moment: a punch-in-my-face could be the end result of a lawsuit and court ruling. Once Kevin got his punch in, we would be back to the equal terms we started with, before I had hit him. Aristotle calls this rectificatory justice, and he notes that people instinctively desire this kind of justice.

In civilized society, however, rectificatory justice rarely comes in the form of the identical harm inflicted on offenders. Eye-for-an-eye tends to be rejected in favor of civil punishments and restitution. Yet, in order to meet the requirements of justice, some kind of equality must nevertheless prevail in the transaction. The paradox is, what can be equal to a punch-in-the-face but a punch-in-the-face? This is the function of what Aristotle terms reciprocal justice: it is equality achieved by the exchange of two disparate things. One punch in the face may be the same as the other, give or take a few pounds of pressure per square inch. But surely there are others ways to place a value on it. Would you take a punch in the face for 50 dollars? $500? $5 million?

Such exercises (paying to punch someone in the face) are puerile and uncivilized as voluntary exchanges, but they can play a key role in the distribution of justice in a complex and refined society. I may not voluntarily and knowingly take a punch in the face for less than $1,000 dollars (I suppose it depends on the strength of the punch!), but whether or not I can exact $1,000 dollars from someone after they have punched me in the face is a different question. Courts and laws (and the best of these are products of common law systems) determine the civil punishments that are appropriate to the crimes, and therefore what constitutes reciprocal justice.

It's easy to think of reciprocal justice only in terms of punishment, but its application is much wider. Any time one gives something to another, not out of charity but in exchange for something in return, there remains a debt until the favor is satisfactorily returned. Reciprocal justice is so pervasive that Aristotle believes society is "held together. . .on the basis of precisely-equal return."

Reciprocity holds men together—why, and how? The answer is that different people have different needs (that is, demands)—all the time—that must be dealt with proportionally. Since the things being compared are almost always disparate, some kind of "cross-conjunction" is needed.

And so we arrive at money, which is used as the prime example of that which brings proportionality to disparate objects and needs. The disparity rises not only in the goods exchanged but also in the needs of those who are exchanging. Everything about money stated by Aristotle must be understood in this context. (This is where his talk of ratios—"Let A be a shoemaker, B a housebuilder, C shoes, and D a house"—comes in.)

Rothbard claims that Aristotle "descends into gibberish" when he discusses the exchange between a house-maker and shoe-maker as resting on the "ratio" between the two. He, and most historians of economic thought, have long read this passage as a kind of confused-Platonist form comparison:

The number of shoes exchanged for a house (or for a given amount of food) must therefore correspond to the ratio of builder to shoemaker. (EN.V.v)

Rothbard saw Aristotle as trying to derive a science of craftsman, or perhaps some kind of labor theory of value. What Aristotle was really saying, I think, is that the number of shoes exchanged for a house is going to be the expression of the disparate needs of the house-builder and shoe-maker. The demands held by each hold them together. And he retains the "corresponds to the ratio" language because he has been drawing ratios since the beginning of Book V.

So we are left with different people with different needs producing different products who nevertheless find a common ground. It is just this very common ground that Aristotle calls justice. Thus, when he later notes that a house appears to be worth about five beds, and that using money is (in terms of value) no different than exchanging the beds themselves, etc., he sounds very Rothbardian. This can only be if his prior reasoning holds.

God's attributes and activities

2009-05-05T11:07:00.001-04:00

There is a seeming paradox if we take our observations of the activities of God—that is, his effects as seen in creation—and infer that therefore God has certain attributes that transcend his activity in the world. Rather, when we discuss attributes of God, we must always remember that we are discussing the effects in creation of the first cause. The first cause is simplex and cannot have parts. But one cause may effect multiple—and even disparate—things.

We are, in essence, asking whether the several and distinct phenomena we encounter in creation (which we call 'good', 'wise', 'just', etc.) are—with respect to their multiplicity—in the cause fundamentally or in the effect fundamentally.

The Israelites are commanded to slaughter their enemies; Christ commands us to pray for ours and to turn the other cheek. On the one hand God seems wrathful; on the other he is merciful. Some explain these in terms of his attributes: God has the attribute of being merciful and thus acts with mercy. But notice we have introduced some form of change into God's nature: to some God exercises his capacities for mercy in concert with his attribute of being merciful, to others God exercises his capacities for wrath in concert with his attribute of being wrathful. This is against our faith, which asserts God to be immutable.

If disparate activity is explained by attributes of God's nature, then what explains the difference in God's attributes? Perhaps there is some overriding attribute, as some posit "justice" to be God's over-arching attribute, that governs how he treats men. For example, he saves some men and condemns others, but treats all with justice. (I have encountered this attitude—a wooden affirmation of God's justice—as a kind of 'trump' card among some theologians for explaining any of God's activity in the world.)

Yet God sometimes acts without respect to justice:

4 He counts the stars and calls them all by name. . .8 He covers the heavens with clouds, provides rain for the earth, and makes the grass grow in mountain pastures. He gives food to the wild animals and feeds the young ravens when they cry. (Psalm 147)

God is gracious towards the living things in his creation, but it would be strange to say that he treats the green hills with justice, just as it would be strange to say that he treats the condemned with mercy and forgiveness.

Imagine a world with no moral agents: God would never appear to have the attribute of being just, yet nothing of his nature would be diminished. Imagine a world where no sinful fall had happened (either angels or men): God would never appear to have the attribute of being merciful, yet nothing of his nature would be diminished. Imagine a world where God did not create the universe...

The key is to avoid thinking of God in terms of attributes which divide his nature into parts. God is simple and never changes. His activity is unified, and as a cause is singular, but the effects from the cause are many and distinct. When we say that "God is good," we do not mean that God has goodness as a part of his nature. Rather, we mean that

'Whatever good we attribute to creatures, pre-exists in God,' and in a more excellent and higher way. Hence it does not follow that God is good, because He causes goodness; but rather, on the contrary, He causes goodness in things because He is good; according to what Augustine says (De Doctr. Christ. i, 32), "Because He is good, we are." (ST I.13.2)

God's existence is prior to his being a cause, and his being a cause is prior to that which we call 'good.' God's activity effects in creation that which we call 'good', but this does not originate from some attribute of God absolutely, but ultimately from the unified activity of God which is his existence. What we call God's attributes are diverse effects of the singular activity of his nature.

Is / ought - Part 4

2009-04-25T09:50:00.000-04:00

Once the dichotomy of fact and value is not presupposed or given "default" status, its proponents have a difficult, uphill road to show its merit.

There was a time when no professional philosopher worth his salt posited the existence of an external world, save with extreme caution or tentativeness. Nowadays there are relatively few philosophers who even take the time to have that conversation. It is a respectable starting point to take the common sense view that there exists an external world.

Skepticism in epistemology is likewise not enjoying primacy in philosophical conversation, even though it reigned supreme 300 years ago. Most conversations begin with a general agreement that knowledge is possible, and many begin with an agreement that certain knowledge (although not "certain" as Descartes defined it) is possible.

The current fact/value dichotomy has a shelf-life. It requires one to believe that facts come from the real world and values come from. . .somewhere else. It supposes that the human conception of reality may depart radically from reality itself, even in its [i.e., the human intellect's] most basic functioning. It is equivalent to the sense-doubters claim that because the sun appears small from a great distance, our eyes must not be reflecting the real world properly. The is/ought dichotomy is a starting point that is ultimately destructive to the sciences (most notably ethics) in the same way Cartesian skepticism was destructive to the science of epistemology several hundred years ago.

Philosophers will likely discard it one day in the future, recognizing that although it sharpened our dialogue, the is/ought dichotomy is in and of itself an empty thing.

Is / ought - Part 3

2009-04-22T14:32:00.000-04:00

If we do not take the is/ought gap for granted, we may ask why one would propose it. But is there any answer to this question that does not, in essence, attempt to bridge the is/ought gap? The act of proposing something is not the same as the reason why one proposes it. Yet to think one proposal preferable to another requires a set of meta-beliefs that give structure to competing data. With is there is only true and false. Ought provides the meta-narrative under which action itself—including that action which determines how one perceives an is—becomes intelligible.

All of reasoned discourse presupposes this kind of ought, in the sense that interlocutors coming to the table must agree that the truth ought to be pursued, or that the participants ought to listen to and understand each other. The very question of which methods we must accept will include a should, or an ought, or some kind of preference.

The is/ought skeptic sneaks positive claims in with their doubt. They use an ought or two, but only insofar as it gives him his platform to deny the rest of them. We ought to accept his paradigm, which demonstrates why every other ought is unnecessary. Yet, it is evident that this very principle judges itself rotten to the core.

Is / ought - Part 2

2009-04-18T14:34:00.000-04:00

If we may posit that human beings act towards some end, and if we also grant that human beings have the capacity of free choice, then one of two conclusions must follow.

(1) It could be the case that free-choice-making is the end towards which human beings act. In this way, no human being, in acting, could fail to fulfill his nature. Imagine the woman who sets out to betray her own end: she wishes to act in such a way that she is not acting. By definition it would be an absurdity. All action would be the highest fulfillment of her existence.

(2) However, the person who has the capacity for free choice, but whose ultimate end is not identical with free-choice-making, faces a unique paradox. The fact of their ability to make free choices necessarily entails that they may act in contradiction to their ultimate end.

This is what grounds the very notion of "ought": having an end, but having the capacity of to do otherwise.

Is / ought

2009-04-18T09:38:00.000-04:00

Using the intellect to state that something is the case without ever exploring what it is creates an unnatural dichotomy in the mind. One instance of this is called the "is / ought" gap, which allows one to observe that human beings have ends by nature, but not to conclude that we ought to reach them.