We Are All Terror Suspects

Earlier, I argued that if we accept Attorney General Gonzales’ argument for the legitimacy of warrantless wiretaps on Americans, that this argument can be used to justify anything that the Bush Administration may want to do.

Basically, if, as Gonzales argues, the Constitution gives President Bush the authority to sign secret executive orders suspending the 4th Amendment, then he can suspend any Amendment. If he can replace the Judicial branch of government with his own Justice Department, and rewrite legislation as he sees fit, then he can eliminate (in practice if not in fact) the Judicial and Legislative branches of government.

Effectively, it is an argument that states that the Constitution does not exist except insofar as it pleases the President to use it.

As further proof of this, U.S. News and World Report has revealed that the Bush Administration is using the same arguments to claim the right to conduct warrantless physical searches of the home and business of “terror suspects.” That is to say, if you are a “terror suspect”, government issues can come into your house and look around without going to a judge and proving probable cause.

That is to say, government agents can look through your home and business after calling you a “terror suspect” without having to show anybody any good reason to believe you really are a “terror suspect”.

We Are All “Terror Suspects”

The article provides a way of illustrating how each and every one of us can be considered a “terror suspect” by the Bush Administration. According to the article, “At least one defense attorney representing a subject of a terrorism investigation believes he was the target of warrantless clandestine searches.”

For my purposes, it does not matter whether this belief is true or the product of an overactive imagination. What matters to me are the logical implications of the arguments that the Bush Administration is using, and how they show that we are all “terror suspects”. Because we are all “terror suspects”, Bush and Gonzales are claiming the legal right to enter each and every one of our homes at will. That is to say, they are arguing that the 4th Amendment to the Constitution does not exist.

So, how does this go?

We have here the case of a lawyer working for a “subject of a terrorism investigation.” This subject need not be guilty of anything. In order to launch a ‘terrorism investigation’, the government needs to do nothing more than point to a person and say, “I am going to investigate that person to see if he or she is in any way involved in terrorist activities.”

A “terrorist activity”, in turn, is any criminal act intending to intimidate or coerce the civilian population of the United States (a definition that applies to many of the Bush Administration’s own policies unless we accept the Administration claim that everything the President does is, by definition, legal).

So, now that the government has targeted an individual for a “terrorism investigation” – with no need for probable cause and no evidence other a desire to find the target individual guilty – instantly his lawyer also becomes the target of a “terrorism investigation”. After all, the target may be getting information from other terrorists through his lawyer, and this is exactly the type of information that the government will want to intercept. Therefore, the government (without a warrant) taps the phone and searches the home and business of the target’s lawyer.

If the Bush Administration can imagine that the target is getting information from his lawyer, then that lawyer would have to be getting that information from somewhere. Likely possibilities include everybody who that lawyer works with. The law offices themselves, and everybody who works there, can now be named subjects of a “terrorism investigation”. Their homes may now be searched without a warrant in the name of national security.

Where might they be getting information? One possibility is that they could be getting information from another client, or an individual who works for another client. So, now, every one of that law firm’s clients are now subjects of a “terrorism investigation.”

Or, perhaps, somebody who works at the law firm writes a blog. Blogs have to be considered ‘international communication.’ One way to pass along information would be to code it into a blog entry, and one way to receive information would be to have others code it into the comments they make to those blog entries.

Now, everybody who reads the blog of the employee of a law firm where one member is representing a terrorist suspect can now be named the subject of a terrorism investigation. Sorry, folks. As it turns out, because you read this blog, the government may now tap your phones and enter your house at will – without a warrant.

The Bush Administration is keen to point out that it only wishes to spy on terrorism suspects – which it claims it must have the power to do in order to keep America safe.

What the Bush Administration does not mention is that we are all terrorism suspects. Because we are all terrorism suspects, the government claims the right to eavesdrop on all of our communications and enter all of our homes. It claims the right to pick any one of us up off of the street and ship us to secret prisons, where we can be tortured until we confess to the crimes we are suspected of committing (even though our confession may well be a desperate act we commit in order to end the torture).

Furthermore, according to Attorney General Gonzales, the Constitution itself shows that the Founding Fathers intended the Executive Branch to have and to use these powers.

Implications

If we combine this report with other news, we get an interesting contradiction. The Bush Administration is claiming that it is only listening in on “international calls” made by “suspected terrorists” (meaning: “anybody it wants to spy on”) in the United States. However, a domestic physical search is not an “international communication”. If the White House is claiming the authority to engage in domestic physical searches without a warrant, then it we must assume that they claim the right to eavesdrop on domestic communications without a warrant.

The article also reports that the Bush Administration has not denied the use of warrantless physical searches. At one point, in Congressional testimony, Gonzales claimed that Bush has only authorized warrantless eavesdropping. However, in a follow-up letter to the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, “"I did not and could not address operational aspects of the program, or any other classified intelligence activities.”

What are these classified intelligence activities? Do they include warrantless eavesdropping on domestic communications and physical searches?

If we want to comfort ourselves with the thought that the Administration claims the authority to use these powers only against “terrorism suspects”, we must be aware that anybody who communicates with somebody who might communicate with somebody who could be communicating with somebody who engages in a form of communication (such as writing a blog or posting to a discussion board) that somebody that the Bush Administration wants to find more information about is a “terrorism suspect”.

Free Speech in the Classroom

This country is acquiring some absurd standards regarding what a teacher can and cannot say in a public school classroom.

• In Indiana, a teacher was fired for answering a student’s question regarding whether she honked for peace.

• In Colorado, a teacher was put on paid leave and told that her contract would not be renewed because she showed her students a film clip (that she got from the local school library) of a sock-puppet version of the opera Faust.

• Also in Colorado, a high school teacher was put on leave for comparing Bush’s State of the Union speech to the speeches of Hitler.

The Use of Selective Evidence

The last article was the first in this set to catch my interest because of the way I used to teach ethics in college. This story came after the parents of a student who recorded a class lecture sent the recording to a right-wing radio station. That radio station then played selected pieces of the lecture in order to incite violence (including death threats) against that teacher and, presumably, any who would dare say anything that was not pro-Bush or pro-Administration.

I would put an argument on the board – an argument for or against a particular position, and then I would defend that argument from whatever objections the students would raise.

For example, if we were discussing abortion I would write on the board:

(P1) It is wrong to kill an innocent person

(P2) A fetus is an innocent person

(C1) Therefore, it is wrong to kill a fetus.

(P3) To abort a fetus is to kill a fetus

(C2) Therefore, it is wrong to abort a fetus

In another example, I would assert regarding homosexuality:

(P1) That something is unnatural, then it is immoral.

(P2) Homosexuality is unnatural.

(C1) Therefore, homosexuality is immoral.

I would tell my students that a sound argument is one that contains a valid argument form (after spending a few days discussing valid argument forms), and true premises. I would also tell them that if they wanted to defeat an argument they needed to prove either that the argument had an invalid form (e.g., by disproof by counter-example) or that one of its premises were false. It was not legitimate to criticize an argument by saying that its conclusion was false while saying nothing about the truth of the premises or the validity of the argument form.

This was my way of inciting the students to participate in class. In each class, there would always be somebody who disagreed with the conclusion that I put on the board. Telling those students that they had to come up with a reason to reject the truth of a premise or the validity of an argument – or they would be forced to accept the conclusion – was enough to get somebody to give the exercise a try.

I would shoot down any criticism any student made against either of these arguments, forcing the student to consider all of the implications of what they were saying.

If the students gave up, then I would offer criticism of the argument. I would give reasons to believe that “A fetus is an innocent person” is false, or why “If something is unnatural, then it is immoral” is false.

One of the things that I told my students that, in any issue that is actually a matter of substantive debate in a society, if they can’t imagine an intelligent person holding the view they reject, then they do not understand the issue.

The point being, anybody who taped one of my lectures would easily be able to find 20 minutes in which I vigorously defended a position that they hated. Any right-wing or left-wing radio talk show host who wanted to incite hatred and violence against me would be able to do so. Since that radio show host would have the only copy of the recording, and would almost certainly refuse to play the rest of the tape, I would have no defense. Certainly, his audience would not be inclined to believe my claim that the rest of the lecture was balanced.

The radio show host in this case is a liar, and deserves our harshest condemnation. Those who would not condemn such a person are those who embrace deception and hate-mongering as positive cultural values. They are people who are contributing to the degradation of our society by promoting hate grounded on lies and making that a part of what it means to be an American.

Balance

But, what if it was not balanced?

There are people who still believe that the world is flat. Is a teacher required to refrain from making claims about the world being round?

There are people who still believe that diseases come from alienation from God; is a teacher required to refrain from telling students that diseases are caused by bacteria and viruses?

Are teachers required to tell their students that trees both do and do not contain spirits that are killed with each tree that is cut down, that people both are and are not being abducted by aliens, and that Kennedy’s murder both was and was not the result of a conspiracy?

There is nothing that a teacher can say in a classroom where there is not at least one person who disagrees with it.

Education is the task of task of telling students that, of all of the things they could believe, some of them are true, and some of them are false. Telling students that everything is true and everything is false is the antithesis of education. If I were looking for a way to subvert a nation by undermining its intelligence, instituting a doctrine where each teacher has to present a ‘balanced’ view of every issue – telling students at the same time that everything is true and everything is false – sounds like a good way to start.

Critical Analysis

Here is another option.

Let’s say that we have parents tell their children that the world is filled with a lot of different types of people with a lot of different beliefs. Part of what it means to be a living human being is to acquire the skill of listening to different people presenting different pieces of evidence and then, from that evidence, draw one’s own conclusion.

The counter to a teacher giving an anti-Bush rant in a social-science class is the teacher in the next classroom who approves of Bush. The way to counter the teacher who says that diseases are caused by bacteria and virus and can often be cured through the use of antibiotics is to make sure that we do not censor the person who says that disease is caused by alienation from God and cured by prayer.

Testing

An effective way to test a moral principle would be to apply it to others who may use it in ways that one would not normally approve of.

For example, let me apply what I have said here to a teacher talking about God. If a teacher stood in front of my hypothetical child’s classroom and said that he believed in God, I would have no reason to protest. My hypothetical child is going to spend his whole life interacting with people who believe in God. Interacting with a teacher who believes in God would be useful experience for when he gets out in the real world.

The same would be true if that teacher explained why he believed in God. When my child came home with questions, I would answer them. I had better have answers for those questions or my own belief that God does not exist would be subject to question.

I think that this is one of the reasons why some parents cry fowl every time a teacher actually tries to teach. Their own opinions are built on such a flimsy foundation that they would not be able to defend them, even to their children. To save themselves the embarrassment of having to try, they insist that the schools prevent their children from becoming more intelligent than they are. Their worst enemy is the teacher who actually tries to teach.

If my child were to answer the question, “Does God exist?” on a test by saying ‘No’, and have the teacher mark that question as wrong, then that teacher (and that school) and I are going to have words. If that school were to discipline my child for saying that God does not exist, then that school and I will meet in court. Of course, I cannot assert that I have a moral basis for filing a lawsuit, unless I acknowledge that the parent whose child is disciplined for saying “God exists” also has a moral basis for filing a lawsuit.

If the teacher were to walk into class each day and begin each class with a ritual where she says, “All of you who believe in God stand up and repeat after me. Any who do not believe in God are anti-American, and are as evil as those who would promote rebellion, tyranny, and injustice,” then that teacher deserves the harshest condemnation – as well as the legislature that made the Pledge of Allegiance a required part of every school day.

If a teacher posts a sign on the wall that says, “We who trust in God are the only decent Americans,” I hold that there would be moral grounds for complaint.

My question is: Did this teacher discipline or degrade my child for holding a contrary opinion, or ridicule, denigrate, and humiliate him in front of his classmates? Such a teacher would deserve condemnation.

Expressing a view does not constitute punishing, degrading, ridiculing, or denigrating those who have another opinion.

Indeed, this would be another important lesson for children to learn in school – exactly how to treat those who have different views with dignity and respect.

Morality and Forms of Moral Argument

I am sorry that this is long. I have been challenged to step once again into the issue of moral theory. I love being able to do this from time to time. However, these arguments are a bit thicker than others and take a bit more time to develop and explain. I hope that I have done so adequately.

In an anonymous comment to yesterday’s post, a reader suggested that I was being inconsistent in my claims about intuition.

In yesterday’s post, I condemned intuition as a valid form of moral argument. I criticized the use of a story in which an individual was given a choice between saving a 2-year-old girl or 5 blastulae from a fire as a way of arguing that certain anti-abortion assumptions were mistaken. I argued that intuitions tell us what our moral sentiments (prejudices) are, but we cannot legitimately infer from this what our moral sentiments should be. So, the confirmed Nazi may have no trouble leaving a group of Jews to die in a fire. His intuitions cannot be used to infer that it is not wrong to leave a group of Jews to die in a fire. Nor can we infer anything from the intuition that one would rather save the girl than the blastulae.

Anonymous compared this to my post, “Morality and the Use of Analogy.” In that post, I defended my use of stories such as “A Perspective on the Pledge” as a legitimate form of moral argument. My defense would also extend to my post two days ago, where I condemned Senator Frist’s comments that Bush is not to be condemned for failure to defend the Constitution because it is wrong to condemn the Commander in Chief in times of war. I illustrated my point by describing the legitimacy of condemning a lieutenant who sought to destroy a fortification he was ordered to hold and defend.

Am I not being inconsistent here? Am I not defending the use of a story to defend a moral point in one case, and rejecting it in another? Is it not possible that a committed KKK member can read, “A Perspective on the Pledge” and come to the conclusion “We really ought to be one white nation under God”, the same way the committed Nazi can look at the fire scenario and say, “It really is permissible to abandon Jews to the fire?”

Strategy

In one area, the anonymous comment raises a valid point – one that springs from strategic considerations.

In order to prevent my postings from being tremendously long (they are already too long as is), I have a specific audience in mind. I do not try to write for everybody. So, for example, I noted that over 80% of the population accepted having “one nation under God” in the pledge. Yet, I was under the impression that there were far fewer people who would accept “one white nation”. Furthermore, most who accepted the former while rejecting the latter would have a firmer commitment to rejecting the latter. So, I aimed my story at those people as a way of convincing them that they should reject the former as well.

In short, I assumed that my target reader already had certain beliefs that a pledge to “one white nation” was unquestionably wrong.

Who is the target audience for the “Who would you rescue” argument? In order to be similar to the Pledge argument, it would have to be people who would believed that a blastulae had the same rights as a child, who would nonetheless rescue the child, and whose commitment to rescuing the child was so strong that this would compel that person to conclude that the blastulae were not persons. By analogy, the “Rescue” argument would be useful only against those who viewed a preference for the blastula over the child was unquestionably wrong.

In questioning the Rescue argument, one of the things that I question is whether the requisite audience – the audience that views abortion as wrong and that saving the blastulae over the child is an even more unquestionable wrong – actually exists.

We must keep in mind that in the original rescue argument we must use the assumption that the blastulae would otherwise be implanted. The five blastulae will in fact become children, and then adults with a life, if the did not perish in the fire. Without this assumption, the arguments are not parallel to that of abortion.

If we apply the Rescue argument to those who firmly hold that blastulae are ‘persons’, it becomes impotent. Such people would save the blastulae precisely because failing to do so would mean that the five lives – the five children and, later, adults who would otherwise have existed, would not be able to experience the lives they would have had.

If we apply the Rescue argument to those who already hold that the blastulae are not ‘persons’, it is redundant and unnecessary. They would rescue the child precisely because they already see the blastulae as mere things not worth saving.

Thus, the ‘rescue’ argument is question-begging; working only on those people who already accept the conclusion, and working on them precisely because they already accept the conclusion.

Intuitionism

More importantly, saying that the Pledge argument depends on an intuition that “one white nation” is wrong – an intuition that has nothing else behind it – is a mistake.

Intuitionism, by its very nature, employs the implication, “I would do (praise doing) X under condition C; therefore, people ought to do X under condition C.” This simply is not a valid inference. It is a clear-cut violation of the ‘is/ought’ distinction (it ‘is’ the case that I would do/praise X; therefore, people ought to do/praise X). Because of this fatal flaw, I reject the idea of using intuition as a form of moral argument.

Argument from analogy is not the same as argument from intuition. Though I reject the idea of moral intuition, I accept the practice of analogy in those circumstances where analogy can be shown to be valid.

In the earlier posting that the anonymous commenter made reference two, I argued for two types of analogy.

Disproof by Counter-Example

One is the standard practice among logicians to use a counter-example to prove that a particular argument form is invalid.

By definition, a valid argument is one in which, if the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true. For example:

(P1) All cats are mammals

(P2) Tsunami is a cat

(C1) Therefore, Tsunami is a mammal

In this argument if premises 1 and 2 are true, then denying the conclusion would lead to a contradiction.

On the other hand, if we had the following argument

(P1’) All cats are mammals

(P2’) Tsunami is a mammal

(C1’) Therefore, Tsunami is a cat

We have an argument where the truth of the conclusion does not follow from the premises. If Tsunami were a dog, for example, both premises would be true, but the conclusion would be false.

This “tsunami = dog” analogy serves as a disproof by counter-example to the second argument. It shows that somebody can accept both of the premises as true, and still reject the conclusion, without forming creating a contradiction.

This is a legitimate use of analogy in an argument. However, it does not rely on intuition. We are not asking anybody to rely on an intuition in seeing that the form of the second argument is invalid. It is a matter of objective fact independent of intuition that there are cases in which the two premises can be true and the conclusion can be false.

This is the type of argument from analogy that I used against the rescue argument.

The rescue argument takes the following form:

(P1) A situation exists in which you can rescue R1 or R2

(P2) You would rescue R1

(C1) Therefore, it would be wrong to rescue R2

Using an analogy – a counter-example in which the person doing the rescuing is a Nazi, R1 is an Arian, and R2 a bunch of Jews, we come up with a situation where one can reasonably accept the premises and still reject the conclusion. By means of this counter-example, we have come up with a disproof of the claim that the Rescue argument is valid.

Desires as Persistent and General Entities

The other form of analogy that I defend relies on the fact that desires are persistent and general entities. What this means is that the desires that will cause a person to do action A under conditions C, will also cause the agent to do a relevantly similar action A’ under relevantly similar conditions C’.

As a result, if we are going to say that it is a ‘good idea’ that an agent have those desires that will cause him to do A under conditions C, then we have to evaluate whether it is also a good idea for him to have desires that will cause him to do A’ under conditions C’. We also have to ask how likely it is that an agent will find himself in conditions C or C’.

This is where action-based moral theories fail. Act-utilitarianism, for example, looks for the best act A under conditions C. It says, “Do that act that has the best consequences.” However, it ignores the question, “What if doing the best act A under conditions C requires desires and aversions that will then cause the agent to do acts without such good consequences under circumstances that are far more common?”

For example, we get counter-utilitarian stories that involve framing an innocent prisoner in order to prevent a riot in which many more people will be killed, or a doctor killing one healthy patient to save five sick patients. These are circumstances C that will almost never happen. Yet, to do the act-utilitarian best act in these circumstances, the agent must have a much lower aversion to framing or killing innocent people. Indeed, we would have to argue that people generally should have a much lower aversion to framing and killing innocent people.

There are countless situations (C’) in which this aversion to killing and framing innocent people prevent worse outcomes. Act-utilitarianism ignores the fact that we need people to have strong aversions to framing and killing innocent people to avoid the suffering and death that would result under all of those more common C’ type conditions.

This is another use for moral arguments from analogy. It is used to examine how those desires that would cause an agent to do act A under conditions C will act under analogous (and far more common) conditions C’. This is essential when it comes to determining whether promoting the desires that would cause the agent to do act A under conditions C is such a good idea.

The Pledge argument uses the relevant conditions C (one nation under God) and C’ (one what nation). It argues that the aversions to a pledge to “one white nation”, as general and persistent entities, apply as well to a pledge to “one nation under God.”

Conclusion

So, we have three forms of argument.

Argument from moral intuition. I reject this form of argument because it takes the form, “In situation C I would do A; therefore, in situation C I should do A.” There is nothing sitting behind this so-called moral intuition but the assessor’s preference for one option over the other. Yet, one cannot make a valid inference from an individual preference to what should or should not be done.

Disproof by counter-example. This is one of the most widely used arguments in logic to disprove the validity of an argument form. It is a perfectly legitimate argument, and I use it all the time. Indeed, this is just the type of analogy that I used to show the invalidity of argument from moral intuition

Argument from the persistence and generality of desire This is an argument concerning the consequences of having a particular desire or aversion which is entirely relevant to the question of whether we should use praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment to promote or discourage a particular desire or aversion.

Of these, I condemn the “Rescue” argument as being an argument of the first type. Yet, this still leaves available arguments of the second and third type.

"Who Would You Rescue?" Arguments

Old Business: Censure

According to a Reuters news story, White House spokesman Scott McClellan, when discussing Feingold’s proposed censure of the President, answered by saying, “...if Democrats want to argue that we shouldn't be listening to al Qaeda communications, it's their right and we welcome the debate.”

Again, the issue is not about whether we should or should not be listening to al Qaeda communications. The question is whether the White House is listening to other communications. The Administration has lied in the past about what it is doing. There is reason to suspect that it is lying now. The purpose of judicial oversight is to make sure that the Administration is listening in on (suspected) al Qaeda communications and not, for example, expanding his spying program to include anybody who criticizes Administration policy – or that it is not spying for profit and selling information in exchange for campaign contributions.

The main point here is that McClellan lied. A lie is a statement that asserts a proposition that one knows is not true. Now, I may be giving McClellan too much credit, but I think he knows that this statement is not true. However, it is a useful lie – some people actually believe it and learn to hate the group (Democrats) that McClellan is trying to target. In making this statement, McClellan clearly is more interested in a useful fiction than in truth. Because of his interest in a useful fiction, I must ask once again, why should we believe what he says about the scope and nature of warrantless spying on Americans?

McClellan's statement is a flat-out lie. If the American people were more willing to condemn those who do not present the nature of the issue under discussion honestly, we would be able to benefit by the honest debates that are actually on-topic that would result. Such statements prove the fundamental dishonest and disinterest in truth on the part of those who make them. Even if one is a Republican, one should be asking whether they endorse fundamental dishonesty on the part of those who speak for the Party.

New Business: “Which Do You Rescue?”

A posting at Unscrewing the Inscrutable pointed me to an audio recording at Calling All Wingnuts in which a caller presented a hypothetical case to an anti-abortion radio talk show host.

You find yourself in a blazing fertility clinic - the fire is ferocious. In one corner there is a two year old girl. In another, there is a petri dish with five fertilized blastula in it. You can rescue one or the other, but not both. Which do you rescue, the girl or the petri dish?

We must add the assumption that the potential rescuer knows that all five blastula would be implanted. Without this, there would be no more of a moral requirement to choose to rescue the blastula (instead of the child) than to rescue five infants on life support who would die within minutes of rescue anyway.

At any rate, my view is that an entity without desires has no interests, and thus has no interests in being rescued. Thus, the blastulae can justifiably be left behind.

However, in accepting that conclusion, I do not believe that all roads that lead to that conclusion are equally sound. These “who would you rescue?” arguments are completely invalid.

The only way that this argument could be valid is if it were possible to go from the premise, “I would rescue X” to “I ought to rescue X”. However, this leaps the famous canyon between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ at a place where there is no valid bridge.

To illustrate the problem with this argument, simply realize that the same argument can be used by, for example, a committed Nazi to prove that Arians are morally more significant than Jews.

You find yourself in a blazing building - the fire is ferocious. In one corner there is a two year old Arian girl. In another, there are five Jews. You can rescue the child or the Jews, but not both. Which do you rescue?

To the committed Nazi, this is an easy question. Yet, this hardly justifies the conclusion, “Then point at Wilkow and everyone else who thinks it's a real dilemma with a hard solution, and laugh uncontrollably.”

Of course, at this point some unthinking reader is prone to think, “How dare you compare abortion providers to Nazis!”

The fact is, I am not comparing abortion providers to Nazis. I am employing a logical technique of disproof by counter-example; showing that an argument is invalid by showing how somebody else (in this case a committed Nazi) can reach a similar conclusion under similar conditions – a conclusion that can clearly be rejected as absurd. In this way, I show that the form of reasoning used in “Who do you rescue?” arguments is invalid.

I reach the conclusion that one morally ought to rescue the 2-year-old child using the “no desires implies no interests” argument, not the “who you would rescue is who you should rescue” argument.

I do not use the “who you would rescue is who you should rescue” argument precisely because it is invalid. (Or, if I have used it anywhere, I will state here that it was a mistake. However, this is a fallacy I try to keep an eye out for.)

A lover of reason would not use the “who I would rescue is who I should rescue” argument. Nor would he praise others who do use it.

And yet, the comments at “Calling All Wingnuts” show that this argument drawing a significant praise. Why is that?

My theory is that people like this argument because of a tendency that I have argued against repeatedly in this blog – a tendency to “fix the intelligence to the policy”. This is the tendency to find a conclusion that one likes (e.g., “Invading Iraq would be a good thing”), then evaluating intelligence arguments according to whether or not it supports the desired conclusion. Any argument that reaches the conclusion is thereby judged to be a good argument. Anybody who comes up with an argument allegedly claiming that the policy would be a mistake is a fool and a traitor.

It is a way of thinking that is responsible for a great many of the problems we now face, and a way of thinking worthy of condemnation even when it is found among one’s policy allies.

Senator Frist: Abandoning the Constitution

Old Business: Dubai Ports

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean is apparently proud of his party’s ability to employ racial hatred and fear to score political points against the Republicans. In a recent radio address, he bragged about how the Democrats blocked the Dubai Ports deal, a policy grounded solely on the proposition that all Arabs are created evil, and thus are a threat to our national security.

This was successful, of course, because the American people are all too eager to accept the proposition that all Arabs are created evil.

The effect of this will be to send a message to the Arab community that those who seek to work hard and establish friendly economic relationships with the United States will be punished for the fact that they are Arab. This will undoubtedly chill any attempt in the Arab community to form peaceful economic relationships with the United States. This, in turn, will feed the growth of those Arab institutions who would instead seek hostile political relationships.

New Business: Senator Frist

In response to Senator Feingold's (D - WI) call for a resolution to censure President Bush for suspending the 4th Amendment to Constitution, Senator Frist (R - TN) said that a time of war is no time to be criticizing the Commander in Chief.

The signal that it sends, that there is in any way a lack of support for our commander in chief who is leading us with a bold vision in a way that is making our homeland safer, is wrong.

Many political pundits suggest that Frist wants to be President.

If this is true, then Frist’s words and actions regarding Feingold’s resolution suggests that he wants to be an omnipotent wartime president with the power to ignore laws and rewrite the constitution at will, while asserting that dissent is the moral equivalent of treason.

Furthermore, he expects the Republican Party to back him up on this, thus expressing confidence that the Republican Party itself supports the idea of a nation where individual “rights” exist only at the pleasure of an omnipotent leader.

After all, the stand that he has taken on this issue is that it is disloyalty bordering on treason to say that the President does not have the right to suspend the 4th Amendment to the constitution and ignore the law that requires judicial review of wiretaps of American citizens. No conclusion can be drawn from this other than the fact that Frist thinks that the President has the power to suspend the Constitution and to ignore the law. If he believes this, then, if he gets elected President, he will no doubt be the type of President who will feel free to rewrite the Constitution and ignore the law, and call ‘treason’ towards any who would protest his actions.

The Moral Right of Criticism

It is simple nonsense to suggest that that any and all criticism of the President of the United States as Commander in Chief, and that all true Americans must goosestep behind the President no matter what he says and does.

To say that, under conditions C, it is wrong to criticize Person P, is the same as saying that "under C, P can do no wrong." Yet, it is absurd to suggest of any Person P that he can do no wrong. Some people may believe that President Bush is no mere mortal, but is instead a special gift from God that lacks the capacity for error. However, recent evidence suggests that this is a slight overestimate of Bush’s capabilities.

As I have argued previously, one does not “support the troops” by giving them an incompetent commanding officer and telling them that no criticism of that officer is permissible. One “supports the troops” by replacing incompetent commanders with competent commanders. This is only possible if it is permissible to say whether a commanding officer is competent or incompetent.

Of course, in times of crisis it is better to obey a less-good order than to debate it. The time wasted in debate over whether a particular choice is ideal can cost more than the difference between following a current worse option over the mere possibility of a better future option. This is why, in the military, once a superior officer gives an order, those under him are bound by duty to obey (with some exceptions).

However, there is nothing in this that implies that criticism is treason. No military officer is ever declared immune from criticism simply because he is an officer.

On this matter, Bush still answers to a higher authority -- the American people. Bush thinks that the only authority he answers to are the voices in his head that he mistakes for God. (Voices that are, in fact, nothing more than his own thoughts couched in the delusion that he is God.) As a matter of fact, as it says in the Constitution, “We the People of the United States of America” are the ultimate “Commanders-in-Chief” in this country. And if we, the true Commanders-in-Chief, decide that an underling is deserving of censure, then it is entirely within our right to order those we hire to begin censorship proceedings – and to dismiss any (such as Senator Frist) who refuse to follow our orders.

As I argued yesterday, Bush clearly deserves a reprimand. We hired him to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. Instead, signed secret orders that placed suspended the Constitution he was told to defend and to place himself above the law. This would be the moral equivalent of a Lieutenant, ordered to defend a fort (Fort Constitution), instead signing secret orders making himself general and ordering the destruction of the fort he was told to defend.

Senator Frist is entirely out of line to be telling we, the people of the United States, that we must not censure an underling of ours who has violated our direct orders to defend the Constitution.

We see in Senator Frist’s words and deeds what we can expect from him if we were to give him the task of defending Fort Constitution from all who would attack it. He is telling us that we must agree to President Bush’s orders to destroy Fort Constitution, so we can only assume that he sees no value in its defense. If Frist were President, he would no doubt continue to assert that he had the same powers he is willing today to grant Bush – the power to ignore the law, rewrite the Constitution to suit his pleasure, and to regard criticism as the moral equivalent of treason.

Presidents do not take an oath to uphold and defend their own absolute and arbitrary power. They take an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. Somebody of Frist’s mindset would be incapable of upholding and defending the Constitution.

If he wants the job of defending the Constitution as President, he needs to show that he is willing to defend the Constitution as majority leader of the Senate.

Feingold's Motion to Censure President Bush

Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) has proposed a resolution in the Senate to censure President Bush for authorizing warrantless wiretaps made illegal by the 4th Amendment to the Constitution and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act..

Whereas I am not a Senator or a standard bearer for either political party, and I do not need to worry about political strategy, I can talk about what ought to be done on a purely moral basis in order to help create and preserve a just legal system.

There is a problem with censure. President Bush has admitted to the wiretapping (though he asserts that it is legal) and says that it will continue. If Feingold’s resolution passes, we will have a rather bizarre situation where the Senate condemns Bush for performing activities that it continues to allow Bush to perform.

It would be like a parent yelling at a child for eating sweets while giving him money that the child asks for so that she can go buy some candy.

What Ought to Be Done

The proper way to deal with Bush’s illegal operations is first with a law that denies funding for all wiretaps that stand in violation of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution (spying on Americans for more than 72 hours without a warrant from the FISA court). These are the actions under contentions, and if Congress cuts the purse strings, the actions would have to stop.

Then, at the same time, either censure or impeach President Bush for those activities.

Proper and Improper Impeachment

Every President who takes the oath of office has individuals calling for his impeachment before the inauguration ceremony even begins. I have long thought that this is stupid. Impeachment is a significant event, and like all such events should not be used for light or transient causes. The impeachment of Clinton was a violation of this principle. It was a politically motivated disruption in the government for petty reasons.

However, a President’s announcement that he has and will continue to act in violation of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution is not a light or transient reason. The President’s sworn duty is to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. The discovery that he has signed secret orders suspending parts of the Constitution he is bound by oath to defend is exactly the type of activity that the powers of impeachment and removal from office were precisely meant to deal with a President who sought to destroy rather than defend the Constitution.

Retired (Republican-appointed) Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor gave a speech at Georgetown University explaining how strong-arming of the judiciary is a step on the road to dictatorship. Within the list of actions she condemned, she included depriving judges of authority to hear cases because the partisan leader does not like their decisions. The 4th Amendment to the Constitution provides Americans with a right to judicial review of government decisions to spy on them, to make sure that the government has probable cause to believe that national security would actually be served. Bush’s secret order denying the FISA court authority to review its decisions when it comes to spying on Americans fit this description.

Of course, President Bush and his administration claim that his actions are legal. Impeachment proceedings and a trial before the Senate would give him the opportunity to defend his claim. His defenders will be allowed to stand before the Senate and present the legal arguments – the claim that the President has unlimited power, including the power to suspend the Constitution, as long as his spin doctors can put the case in terms of national security – and Senators will be able to cast their vote on whether they agree or disagree with that statement.

At which point the voters will have the opportunity to decide if they want to vote for or against a Senator who would vote to establish an executive branch with absolute dictatorial powers.

Freedom and Democracy

As I said at the start, this is an essay that explains what should be done in the absence of any consideration of political strategy. Congress has made no move to suspend funding for these illegal wiretaps. In doing so, they have implicitly endorsed the thesis that the Executive Branch can sign away our Constitutional rights at will. This means that the question of whether we are going to vote for or against representatives who refuse to protect and defend the Constitution from those who would suspend its operation at will is already upon us.

If, after the November elections, we have a government that continues to spy on us without judicial review in violation of the 4th Amendment, it will ultimately be because we have decided to vote for repeal of the Bill of Rights by executive order. Ultimately, the defense of our freedom does not rest with the Executive Branch, or the Legislature, or the Judiciary, but with us as voters.

This is truly an election in which the American voter needs to ask, “Will I vote for the Bill of Rights and the Constitution of the United States, or would I vote against it?” This is an election in which each voter gets to decide if they are in favor of an Executive Branch claiming that it has the authority to suspend all or part of the Constitution at will, or against it.

My prediction is that the people will vote against the Constitution in this election. Yet, the moral argument says that they ought to vote for it, and for a Congress that will deny the President’s claim that he has an obligation to obey the Constitution only if and insofar as it pleases him to do so.

As recent elections in Egypt, Iraq, and among the Palestinians tells us, democracy is no guarantee of freedom. Democracy guarantees freedom only if freedom is something that the voters value, and something that they will look at in casting their votes. This election, we get to discover if the American voters are people who value freedom, or are among those who would vote against their own freedom.

Nothing to Hide

The government is only spying on terrorists. If you have nothing to hide, you have no reason to oppose government spying.

Wrong!

Warrantless government spying is a government license to spy on anybody who opposes Administration policies.

Mike DeWine (R – OH). Lindsey Graham (R – SC), Chuck Hagel (R – NE), and Olympia Snowe (R – ME) have proposed legislation that would legalize the Bush Administration’s program of spying on Americans without a warrant.

Here are four senators who may be considered enemies of the Constitution.

Such a law would be in violation of the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which says,

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

However, we can no longer count on the Judiciary branch to uphold and defend the Constitution. The Bush Administration has specifically selected and the Congress has appointed judges based on a promise to turn their back on the Bill of Rights.

However, as I said in the past, this blog does not concern itself with what the law does or does not say, but with what the law should and should not say. I have argued in the past that the 4th Amendment to the Constitution was not a mistake and provides important safeguards. A just society would have to incorporate the principles contained within the 4th Amendment into its laws even if such an Amendment did not exist.

We can see this in potential for abuse that the legislation that these anti-4th Amendment senators are trying to pass.

According to the Los Angeles Times:

Investigators would only have to prove probable cause to themselves, never to a judge or outside agency. After that month and a half, the warrantless surveillance could continue if the attorney general insisted that it was necessary to protect the United States.

This is effectively the same as saying that probable cause is not required, because anybody can demonstrate probable cause to themselves under any and all circumstances. Hitler certainly did not lack a belief that he had probable cause for everything he did.

One objection to be raised against this legislation concerns the question, “Who counts as a threat to national security?” Members of the Bush Administration have explicitly said that anybody who says anything negative about the Bush Administration is giving aid and comfort to the enemy. In the 2004 campaign they said that if the Democrats got elected, America would be less safe. Certainly, electing or supporting Democrats was considered a threat to national security. So, what prevents the Administration from saying that it has probable cause for spying on anybody who supports the Democrats or on any Republican who does not toe the Administration line?

Judicial review is not meant to prevent the Administration from spying on suspected terrorists. It is meant to prevent the Administration from employing a philosophy against all political opponensts of, “If you are against this us, then you are against America.”

The Bush Administration has demonstrated that it is thoroughly infected with this, “For Bush or against America” way of thinking. Recall that the NSA spying has never had any oversight, and nobody but the Bush Administration itself knows who they are really spying on, or why. This legislation will keep it that way.

It makes one wonder whether the Bush Administration is using the information it gets from spying to manipulate its political allies and opponents? I am not saying that they are, but I am pointing out the fact that authorizes spying without oversight makes it easy for the Administration to do such things. The potential for abuse is criticism enough.

Where the Attorney General gets to privately authorize spying whenever he sees a potential threat to national security, we must realize that the Attorney General is appointed by the President. In this case, Gonzales seems to think that it is his job to justify whatever the President wants to do. He has twisted the definition of torture in such a way that American interrogators can question prisoners sometimes to death without this being called torture.

This is the same attorney general that has already defended the unlimited power of the President to do whatever he pleases in his position as Commander in Chief, powers that include the right to kill people at will without trial, as I wrote about in “The Right to a Fair Trial”

Under this legislation, the only thing any President needs to do is to appoint an attorney general who shares the philosophy, “Anybody who is against the Administration is against the United States,” at which point criticism of the President becomes ‘probable cause’ and the critic becomes a target for government spies.

Nothing to Hide

The claim is that, “If you have done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to hide and should not care if the Bush Administration is spying on you.”

This only makes sense to somebody who has fallen into the trap of thinking that the Bush Administration is morally perfect in everything that it does, so that “against the Bush Administration” becomes synonymous with “wrong”.

What a person might want to hide from the Bush Administration may be the fact that he does not agree with or support the Administration's position on some issue. He may oppose a plan to allow an Arab country to unload shipping in American ports. He may oppose the Bush Administration’s plan to let India have an unlimited stockpile of nuclear weapons. He may be a part of an international organization working to fight global warming, or some other environmental cause that the President opposes. He could be a newspaper reporter tracking down a story that the Administration is taking American citizens off of the street and locking them up in a secret foreign prison.

These are the types of activities that a right to privacy (a right against warrantless government searches) protects. What it all boils down to is a right to think that the Bush Administration is mistaken on some issue, and to take steps to (peacefully and legally) oppose the President on that issue.

Even if a person believes that the Bush Administration is and must always be considered the model of moral perfection, there is still a right to believe otherwise – a right that an unlimited Administration power to enforce the doctrine, “If you are against this Administration, then you are against America” makes no room for.

Significance

I also fail to understand what these four legislators think this law will accomplish. To any degree that it contains limits on Presidential power, the President will merely issue a signing statement saying that he will interpret this law in a way that is consistent with his own view that the President’s power cannot be limited by Congress.

Recall what Bush did to the proposed limit on torturing prisoners. He issued a signing statement that stated that he could ignore this law if he felt that it was important to national security (meaning "important to protecting and preserving the unlimited arbitrary power of the Bush Administration"). So, at the same time he signed the law, he made it impotent. He will do the same to any limits on his domestic spying program.

Furthermore, this legislation will replace an earlier FISA law that the Administration is already ignoring. What makes anybody think that an administration that ignores a law will not also ignore its replacement?

Yet, this legislation is still important. Hopefully, someday, we will once again become a nation of laws instead of a nation of men. Someday, we will once again require that our Presidents obey the law and shun anybody who believes, “It is not illegal if the President does it.” When that time comes, we will need to have good laws, and this legislation is not good law.

Conclusion

Osama bin Laden cannot take away our freedom. He may be able to destroy a few buildings and kill a few people, but only our own government can destroy our freedom.

The principles behind the 4th Amendment are essential for a free country. They help to protect the right to disagree with those in power. Without the protections embedded in the 4th Amendment, the Administration can target anybody who expresses an opinion that it does not like. There has to be limits on the government. People have to be able to say, “I disagree with the President on this issue, and I am going to work politically to fight this program,” without becoming a government target.

This does not say that the government has no power to spy on terrorists. This only says that if the government is going to do any spying, then it must prove to an independent 3rd party – a judiciary branch – that it has probable cause to believe that the people it is spying on really are terrorists, rather than people with legitimate complaints against the Administration’s policies who are seeking legal ways to change those policies.

The Happy Evangelical

An article called at Slate.com called, “Desperate Feminist Wives: Why wanting equality makes women unhappy,” by Meghan O'Rourke pointed me to some research showing that traditional stay-at-home wives (or those women who accepted the traditional role of the stay-at-home wife) were happier than those who sought more progressive lifestyles.

As I read the study, I immediately imagined throngs of people who would not like this conclusion deciding that the research was obviously flawed and that any decent researcher would see that the data did not support these conclusions. At the same time, those who liked the conclusion would stretch the research beyond all reason and assert that we should re-establish the ideal of the traditional marriage.

This would be the counterpart to an article that I discussed earlier that showed a correlation between religiosity and social ills. Upon publication of that article, evangelicals started a campaign of personal attacks against Dr. Paul, making up claims about what the research said in order to criticize it. At the same time, critics of religiosity started to use this as proof that religiosity caused these social ills.

In fact, what Dr. Paul’s study accomplished was to criticize the claim that evangelicals had been making for decades that. "These ills are caused by the growth of liberalism" and "The reason that our society is in moral decline is because we have kicked God out of the public square."

That article showed that countries that have kicked God even further out of the public square than America has fewer social ills. Evangelicals hypocritically expressed deep contempt for those who expressed a causal relationship where the study only showed a correlation. Yet, at the same time they committed a moral crime worthy of greater condemnation. They asserted the opposite causation without even so much as a correlation to back it up. If they had sought to collect such evidence, they would have found it going the opposite direction. However, they had no interst in collecting data -- their hate was the only data they needed.

In the study mentioned in Slate.com, feminists who have been claiming that women would be better off asserting a more progressive and egalitarian marriage find themselves faced with a correlation that contradicts their assertions. We immediately find feminist progressives engaging in the same type of behavior they would have otherwise condemned. They condemn those who violate the logical principle, “correlation does not imply causation” when they have spent decades asserting causation without even offering evidence of correlation.

The Implications of Happiness

So, what does this study actually show? What conclusions can we draw?

First, if we had a study that showed that firefighters were happier than school teachers, this would not support the conclusion that everybody should be a firefighter. It does not even support the conclusion that school teachers would be happier if they were firefighters.

If there are women who are happy in a traditional stay-at-home marriage, and can find themselves such a marriage with a good husband who can also be happy in that type of relationship, there is no reason to condemn them. Indeed, we should be happy for them. However, this does not imply that everybody would be happy in that type of arrangement, or that we should condemn those who find their happiness living a more progressive lifestyle.

The same study did show that some women living a progressive lifestyle were happy, and their happiness should not be held in contempt because others are happy in a traditional marriage.

The Value of Happiness

Another issue to keep in mind is that happiness is not the only thing of value.

This can be shown using a thought experiment that is widely used in the area of value theory.

Let us assume that I have invented an experience machine. If I plug you into this machine, it will cause you to believe that you are in a situation where you would be very happy. In fact, I have programmed this machine to recognize when it was feeding you experiences that lit up the sections of your brain indicating happiness, and to seek experiences that activated this part of your brain. So, for example, if the machine discovered that your happiest moments were caused by believing that you were a doctor saving peoples’ lives on a daily basis, it would feed you experiences of being a doctor that was saving patients’ lives.

As long as you were in the machine, you would be happy.

Now, would you agree to enter into the experience machine?

Most people would not.

We can say of those who would enter the machine that they value happiness above other things. However, in order to explain those who would not enter the machine, we are forced to conclude that they value something other than happiness. They are willing to give up happiness in order to realize something else that has value to them, such as living in the real world.

Please note, the concept of a “desire” that I have been using as the foundation for these blog posts easily handles these types of thought experiments. This theory states that people seek the fulfillment of their desires. If they desired happiness, then they would choose to enter the experience machine because they would find happiness there.

However, if a person desires to help the needy, then he is only going to value situations that make the statement “I have helped those in need” a true statement. The experience machine cannot accomplish this, so he finds no value in the experience machine. Instead, he has to help real people who are really needy. The person who desires to help those in need would not enter the experience machine. He would consider the experience machine a fate as bad as death, because both will equally prevent him from accomplishing what he desires.

This view creates a problem for the happy evangelical housewife – the woman who enters a traditional marriage because she thinks she is pleasing God. This woman would be in the same position as the person who enters the experience machine where he thinks he is helping the needy. That person would be happy, but it would be a false happiness.

A worse situation is one in which the individual in the experience machine actually does harm to others. Let us take this person who wishes to help children in need, and offer him an experience machine that will feed him the experiences of helping children in need. However, each time the experience machine feeds him such an experience, a real-world child is made to suffer great harm.

A person with a genuine desire to help children would be adverse to allowing anybody to use such a machine. The false happiness of being in the machine saving virtual children would not tempt him in the slightest.

The evangelical lifestyle in some cases is much like this type of experience machine. The evangelical housewife in the traditional role may be happy, but her experience machine is one that causes misery and suffering for others. In the name of promoting God’s will, she not only confines herself to a traditional marriage. She also promotes laws and social institutions that are harmful to women who would not be happy in a traditional marriage, homosexuals, non-believers, women in the first months of pregnancy, patients who may benefit from stem cell research or other medical advances, and those prevented from learning about sex and biological sciences, to name a few.

These are the people who are being sacrificed by the evangelical’s desire to live in an experience machine that generates her false happiness.

Happiness is not the only thing that matters. True happiness – the marriage of truth and happiness – is better than false happiness, and false happiness that does harm to others is the worst form of happiness of all.

Conclusion

This world would enjoy a great benefit if we could reduce the number of people who attempt to fit the intelligence to their cherished beliefs. We need to promote an attitude of contempt for those who think in terms like, "This study says something that I do not like; therefore, it was poorly done and its conclusions are to be rejected."

It is an attitude that can also be found in an administration that says that, “This intelligence does not support the conclusion that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, so it must be flawed,” or “This study suggests that we will not be greeted as liberators who can establish a democracy in Iraq for 1.8 billion dollars, so its author must be an atheist liberal who cannot do good research.”

It is time to promote the idea of fitting one’s conclusions to the evidence, rather than the other way around.

If there are women who are happier in traditional marriages, and they can obtain this happiness in an environment that is not harmful to others, then they should be allowed to do so. There is no moral crime in admitting this.

At the same time, we need to pay attention to the fact that true happiness is better than false happiness, and better by far than a false happiness that requires an environment that does harm to others. An examination of the moral facts shows that happiness is not the only thing that matters.

6 Month Anniversary

Old Business: Medical Front

We are looking at the possibility that Lesley may need a pacemaker in order to get her heart rate where it should be. This is another nice piece of medical technology brought to us by those "atheist materialist scientists" who spend their time looking for the real and verifiable causes of things.

The doctors are only hinting at the pacemaker option, but I do not hear any other suggestions right now other than a natural recovery, which is looking unlikely with each passing day.

New Business: 6 Month Anniversary

However, today I would like to celebrate a half year of blogging. I started this adventure on September 10th, shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. The moral issues surrounding that story told me that I had a lot to write about. My first posts concerned the issue of assigning blame, and the Bush Administration’s condemnation of “The Blame Game”, which we may reasonably assume came from the fact that it was to blame. Further postings discussed issues from price gouging to “A National Day (or more) of Science” that covered the fact that science held far more promise in helping the people of New Orleans than Prayer

At the time, I did not really know if I had the stamina and the interest to keep up a blog. Even if I did, I wondered about the ability to come up with things to write about. I suspect that a vast majority of blogs ultimately end up dying from the neglect of their owners. Yet, so far, things seem to be working out. I have missed only three days out of 183 – and one was due to my wife’s catastrophic illness.

Since I now think that I will be able to keep this up, I am starting to ask what I can do to improve the quality of this blog – to make it more useful to those who stop by.

If you (the reader) have any advice that you would like to offer, I would love to hear it.

I have received a request to add something that will track new comments, even on old blog entries. Also, I have received a request for categories. If anybody has suggestions on how I can set something like this up, I would be more than happy to listen.

Action

I am also spending more of my time wondering what could be done to turn the topics of these blog entries into action. What good does it do to write a half-dozen blog entries about the threat that the Bush Administration poses to the 4th Amendment to the Constitution (and the other members of the Bill of Rights)? He still does what he wants. Congress still rolls over and plays dead.

Once upon a time, we could count on the Judiciary to declare such a law unconstitutional. However, today, we have a judiciary filled with judges who have been hand picked specifically because of their expressed willingness to turn their back on the Bill of Rights.

We have now come closer to having an autocratic government than we have come in 230 years. Is there something that can be done other than write blog entries explaining why it is wrong?

I have long held the view that we do not need to worry much about these things. The system, I felt, was ‘self-correcting’ and excesses like those of the Bush Administration would simply not be tolerated by a freedom-loving people. Yet, they are being tolerated. More than that, a huge section of the population thinks we should have an Executive Branch with unlimited political power.

So, how do we defend our rights when so many people want to give them away?

We need to do more than give wordy arguments that show why these actions are wrong. We also need to actually start putting the tools of praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment to work promoting those who would defend these rights, while inhibiting the creation of sentiments like those found in the Bush Administration that would destroy these rights.

We need people who are willing to say loudly, “Not only will I not support anybody who does not defend the 4th Amendment; I hold nothing but contempt for those who speak favorably of those who would destroy those freedoms.”

Because of these concerns, I hope to devote a little more of my attention in the future to doing more than present moral arguments. I hope to direct more energy into actually targeting real praise, condemnation, reward, and punishment where they will do the most good.

Parties

One thing that I would like to encourage readers to do is to get involved in whatever political party dominates their part of the country. It does not matter whether that party is Democrat or Republican. Both parties have the ability to be nudged, however far one can nudge it, towards a more moral platform.

I have no particular love or hate for either of them. I view each as being as dangerous as the other – though for separate reasons. I suspect that I would be just as comfortable (or uncomfortable) in either party. On the Republican side, I would have their anti-science views and violation of church and state, while loving the idea of limited government. On the Democratic side I would view their economic policies to be as destructive as the Republican anti-science policies and their “no war” foreign policy as naïve as that of a father who refuses to protect his children from those who would do them harm.

Therefore, I see no reason to encourage anybody to join either party. Instead, I would recommend joining whatever party was in power and try to guide it more towards what is right.

The reason that the candidates of the Religious Right win school board elections is because nobody gets involved on those elections. Because of this, a small block of people to take control of the institution of education and brainwash the next generation into following their lead. The result has been the establishment of the anti-science, anti-reason, anti-intelligence platform of the Creationists as the standard for education across the country. One thing we sorely need are people seeking to be members of their local Board of Education who value science, reason, and intelligence.

Of course, there are ways to become involved in making change that does not involve joining a political party. One could join a special interest group. Though, even within such a group, there is reason to look closely at what the group stands for. There may be a need to nudge that group into accepting a more morally solid position on some issues.

So, I am interested in hearing from readers about any actions that they might be taking. If you think that there is something going on worthy of attention, click on my profile to the right and send me an email. I’ll look it over and see if it is worth recommending.

I do think it is time to do a bit more than simply write essays.

Atheists In Foxholes Syndrome

On the medical front, Lesley had her gall bladder removed today, and we are waiting to see if this will allow her other systems to return to normal. While she sleeps off the effects of surgery, I have time to do some writing.

In a comment made to yesterday’s post, Derek Scruggs asked the following question:

…recently, I've wondered how I would respond if my own death were imminent (i.e., a terminal disease during which I'm lucid). I'm very committed to my beliefs (or actually lack thereof), but I wonder how I'll react emotionally at the moment of truth. (And, for that matter, whether my reaction even matters.) Have you ever thought about this?

Yes, I have.

Now, before I get too far into this, I want to start by addressing a different question relevant to the overall theme of this blog. This blog is concerned with ethics -- with what ought and ought not to be the case. I do not think that a discussion of my own personal psychology would be all that interesting. Yet, I do think that it is interesting to look at how we ought to react to the prospect of our own deaths.

On this matter, some of the elements of the desire utilitarian theory that I use as the foundation for my writings has some relevance.

Namely, our desires are malleable. They are not perfectly malleable. However, within certain ranges, we can choose what we like and dislike in the same sense that we can choose what to have for dinner or which college to go to. To the degree that we have the capacity to make that choice, it makes sense to ask, "What should we like or dislike?"

One example of choosing a desire is the person who chooses to use or not use drugs. One of the effects of using certain drugs is to strengthen the desire for that drug. If one does not want to become addicted to a particular drug, one can choose not to use it and, thus, not to acquire the addictive desire.

This is just an example to explain the concept of choosing a desire.

Another way that we can choose our desires is to rehearse. An individual imagines himself in a situation where a particular desire comes into play and imagines the reaction he thinks that he should have. In some circumstances, the more effort that one puts into this type of exercise, the closer an individual can come to matching his actual response to the ideal response.

I walk over a foot bridge on my way home from work every day. Honestly, every time I have left for work with my wife sick in bed, I have crossed that bridge on the way home thinking to myself, "What if I find my wife dead or terribly sick when I get home?" I thought about and mentally rehearsed my reaction every time that happened. I thought, "What should I do if this ever happens?

When I discovered Lesley in such bad shape, I was pretty badly shaken. However, I was able to remember the mindset that I had chosen in thinking about that situation and get into it. There were a couple of times that I remember where my thinking got fuzzy. However, a minute later, I thought about what I had done and was able to give a calmer, more rational response.

I have also "rehearsed" the scenario in which a doctor tells me that I have a short time to live. At first, this thought would fill me with an overwhelming emotional wave of grief. However, I responded to this by saying that this reaction would be a waste of the time that I would have left. What I would want to do was to make productive use of that time.

This blog (or, actually, my writing in general) is the most important thing that I do. If I get news of my imminent death, and I was lucid, I would ask for whatever tools I could use to write my next blog entry. I have imagined being in a hospital where the doctor objects by saying, "You must rest and preserve your strength." My response will be, "Two weeks of doing what is important to me is worth two months doing nothing but waiting to die."

My first blog entry after I got that news would be something like, "The doctors say that I have a short time to live, so I want to start summing up what I have tried to say in all of my writing. The most important thing that I have tried to communicate is . . ."

I am confident that there will be no last-minute grasp at the straw of religion and an afterlife. I will not fall victim to "no atheist in foxholes syndrome" (if I may coin a phrase) in which the threat of imminent death brings about an instant conversion to the nearest religion. To suddenly pursue those options would be to waste the little bit of time I would have left.

What a tragedy it would be to have such little time left and to waste it. No . . . I have already mentally rehearsed a response that I hope will ensure that those final days will not be wasted.

This type of rehearsal is useful in a wide range of areas. What would you do in case of a fire in your home? How would you handle a situation where somebody was choking on food? What if you were walking down the street and there was this terrible automobile accident right in front of you?

It is one thing to have a vague idea of how to perform the Heimlich maneuver. It is another to have actually taken the time to mentally (or, better, physically) rehearsed the procedure vividly so that, if the need ever arose, you would be more likely to react appropriately.

So, Derek, if I were to offer advice, I would suggest that you do not waste time wondering how you would react in such a situation. I would recommend that you go through the effort of choosing your reaction. Then, imagine that situation as vividly as possible and "role play" in your head the reaction you have selected. Do this until the reaction you have chosen is natural.

I am not saying that all of our desires are subject to this type of control. Everything I have written applies only to those desires that are within our control and only to the degree that they are within our control.

The Unimportance of Belief in God

First, I apologize for missing a day on my blog. With my wife still in intensive care, I have not been able to focus on the issues that I would normally be writing about. She is better, but we are still trying to figure out how to fix a couple of problems, and I spend more time with her than I do writing.

Still, I want to address kck1999's request from my last blog entry for a discussion about the existence of "something beyond ourselves." I recognize the sincere interest in that discussion. However, I am obligated to report that I would be a poor candidate for that discussion.

When it comes to the existence of a God, my overall attitude tends to be "I do not care."

I am not saying that this is not an important question, or that it is wrong for people to care about this question. There are, in fact, a whole bunch of important questions -- too many for any one person to answer. As my wife sleeps, medical experts are seeking answers to a set of important questions. I admit that the answers to those questions are important. They are important to me. However, I also admit that I am not the best person to seek answers to those questions – at least not in a timely manner. On this issue, I have decided to trust to experts.

Value theorists recognize that, with human limits being what they are, a rational person will choose to be ignorant about certain things. The concept of "rational ignorance" may seem strange at first -- why would it be a good thing for a person to choose to be ignorant? Yet, a moment's reflection shows that this is obvious. Since we cannot know everything, we must choose those things that we will spend time learning, thereby choosing everything else as those things about which we will remain ignorant.

Yet, I call myself an "atheist ethicist," asserting that I am not ignorant about the existence of God. I claim that the proposition, "God exists" is false. However, I do not think it takes a lot of effort to reach that conclusion. I also conclude that "Leprechauns exist" is false. I do not need to go into an in-depth review of all of the literature surrounding the nature of leprechauns to reach that decision. I can look at the general tendency that civilizations have to invent fictitious entities (unicorns, giant spiders, Cyclopes, chimera, dragons, elves, hobbits, Zeus, Xochopilli, etc.) and easily fit leprechauns into that general category.

I also do not see any reason not to put Adam, Eve, Satan, God, angels, demons, and the like in this same category -- another one of those creative stories.

Now, I am a philosophy student, and I spent some time examining the basic arguments for or against the existence of God. These include the Ontological Argument, the two Cosmological Arguments (first cause, continuing cause), the Design Argument, Pascal's Wager, the Argument from Evil, and the like. It was enough to settle the issue that no God exists.

This study has told me that there is a set of experts who devote themselves to these questions as there are experts in the field of medical science. These are academic philosophers – those who are experts in analytic philosophy in the field of metaphysics and ontology. I look over their results from time to time, and they remain convinced that there is no evidence for a God. Therefore, I remain convinced that there is no evidence for a God.

It was also enough to settle the issue that I could put the question of God's existence aside and focus on other things -- just as I have put the questions of medicine aside to focus on other things.

It does not matter to me whether you or anybody else believes in a God. What matters to me is whether a person can commit to a life in which he helps those around them when they need help, does no harm at all other times, and seeks truth through scientific inquiry.

Where I have problems with any particular religion, it is when the followers of that religion say, “My God tells me to do harm to these people, so I will dedicate my life to that which does them harm,” or “My God tells me to stand in the way of these people getting help that will save their lives or improve the quality of their lives; therefore, I will act so as to prevent these people from getting help.”

The former is exemplified by those who crash airplanes into sky scrapers, threaten cartoonists with death, or pass laws banning homosexual marriage – all actions intending to do harm to a group of people. The latter is exemplified by those who block stem-cell research, refuse to allow their sick child to be tended to by a physician, or seek to promote ignorance in public schools (e.g., creationism and ‘intelligent design’).

I have talked with at least 8 different doctors in the past 2 days. I certainly have no reason to be concerned with whether any one of them believes in God. My only concern is that every one of them is seeking the physical cause of my wife’s medical problems and the best, most reliable course of treatment. The instant one of them comes to me and says, "Your wife's illness is an example of irreducible complexity. It could not have been caused by natural forces, and is proof of the existence of a perfectly benevolent creator," that doctor will not set foot near my wife again. He will be of no use.

If my neighbor believes that there is a benevolent God who created the universe, that such a God commands him to help those neighbors who need help and forbids doing harm to neighbors, and created a universe whose laws could be learned through scientific inquiry, I have no interest in fighting with him over the existence of a God.

I would rather ally with him to make sure that those who are in need of help get it, that no harm comes to others, and that those truths that can be gained through scientific inquiry -- truths like those that will determine how well my wife makes it through this current illness.

Those are the questions that I have sought to concern myself with. And I have put at least as much time and effort into understanding those issues as the doctor has put into learning how to treat my wife's illness.

Anyway, if you are interested in the existence of a God, I could probably find others who share that interest who you can talk with. It's just not my area of expertise.

The Atheist Materialist Scientist

I came home from work Monday evening and discovered my wife sick in bed. She had dried blood on her lips and all over the inside of her mouth. When I talked to her, she would look at me, but she would not give me any sign that she knew what I was saying.

I called 911.

When the paramedics arrived, they said that she was running a temperature of 106.4 degrees, and that they needed to get her to the hospital. I spent a long evening wondering if she would live and, even if she did live, whether the Lesley that I knew would still exist in her body.

She is in the Intensive Care Unit, but she is doing much better. Right now she is sleeping, and I am taking advantage of this opportunity to do some writing.

One issue that came to my mind this evening is that his is precisely the type of situation in which others would begin to pray, and in which atheists are supposed to lose their 'faith' in a godless universe and start pleading for divine help. People who think such things may be expected to ask whether I felt any inclination to pray. Did I have any interest in clutching at divine straws and saying, "God, if you do exist, please do not take my wife?"

The answer is, "No."

Not even a little bit.

Prayer will not help. Whether Lesley gets better or not -- whether we will get to finish out a long life together -- depends on one thing. It depends on trained professionals who know what happens when certain chemicals mix with the chemicals in the human body at certain temperatures. That knowledge is what will determine the difference between life and death, and the quality of life if there is one.

From the moment that I discovered her at home, I have sought to save her life soly by relying on the discoveries of those "atheistic materialist scientists" have been making since they started looking for real-world material explanations for events.

Note: I will use the term "atheist materialist scientist" in this blog entry, even though many scientists are not atheists and many theists make good scientists. This phrase, "atheist materialist scientist" is a derogatory term invented by people who want to denigrate science by associating it with something that a majority of the people already hate -- atheists. This is a tried and true marketing technique used to manipulate perceptions -- to associate what one wants others to hate with something they already hate. In this case, they want to exploit the fact that 'atheist' in the minds of most people is a word much like "nigger" or "kike" -- a term of hate. Still, I will use their term.

As I said, the first thing that I did was call 911. Over the course of the past few centuries, "atheist materialist scientists" were not content to say that nature was 'irreducibly complex.' They sought natural explanations for events in the real world. In doing this, they discovered the powers of electromagnetism. They learned how to set up an electromagnetic field in one area and use it to send a transmission through space that will set off an electromagnetic field in another location, and do so in a way that transmits information. In this way, I was able to quickly give information to rescue teams set up for just such an emergency.

Using this technology, I summoned help. Within five minutes, I had a dozen people in my house trained to deal with just this type of an emergency.

I would also like to note how this situation refutes the claim that 'without God, all things are permissible.' Without God, atheists have far more reason to set up institutions like 911 and rescue squads and moral institutions that say that it is better to help than to ignore those in need. With no God to touch Lesley with a loving hand and save her, her fate was in the hands of my fellow citizens, with whom I must be able to communicate efficiently, and who have to want to help her. Without a God, we need heroes more than ever.

They arrived in vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. Over those same centuries in which "atheist materialist scientists" were studying electromagnetism, they also studied how gasses behave under different temperatures and pressures, and of how certain liquids, in the presence of oxygen and heat, create gas through combustion. Using this information, they learned to squirt liquid into a cylinder, add a spark, create a gas under pressure, and use that pressure to turn the wheels of a vehicle. Within minutes after I made my call, they were parked outside my house, and a team of individuals seeking to provide aid to those in need were inside the house looking after my wife.

When we got to the hospital, I was most grateful for hordes of people who had abandoned the idea that disease was the 'irreducibly complex' product of a perfectly benevolent God. It was once the case that the church said that we should not fight disease and illness -- that doing so was 'playing God', and that meant it was wrong. Countless people suffered and died under this philosophy. Fortunately, I lived in an era when people 'play God' on a daily basis, and were willing to take on the task of seeing to it that my wife, who would otherwise have died, would live instead. If that is not 'playing God', then nothing is.

I did not want a bunch of witch doctors with painted bodies chanting and dancing around the bed spreading incense as a way of asking God to save Lesley. Instead, I wanted her surrounded by people who were gifted at understanding the findings of those "atheist materialist scientists" who had been studying how the physical human body works. Those were the people who discovered that high temperature had a material explanation -- typically infection. Other "atheist materialist scientists" trying to discover how these bacteria live and die discovered a number of antibiotics, which they started putting into Lesley right away.

She is still not out of the woods. The fever is broken, and she is coherent again. However, there are some residual complications that we are concerned with.

There is no value in praying or asking a God that does not exist for any favors. What Lesley needs are people who understand the atheistic materialistic explanations for how the human body operates -- people who can then look at what is not working well and figure out how to correct the problems.

One could then respond that this is just another type of "faith" in another type of religion.

That's absurd. This "atheistic materialistic scientist" looks for results that can be replicated, and then selects those methods that produce the same results.

If only religion would seek to subject their faith to scientific tests in order to discover who is right and who is wrong, rather than resorting to bombs, guns, and laws that aim to diseducate children before they are old enough to understand what is being done to them. I have never heard of a religious group dividing malaria patients into two groups, subjecting one to the rituals of Religion A, while subjecting the second to the rituals of Religion B, to see which group God favors over the other. This would be one way to discover if God is a Christian or Muslim.

However, these tests do not provide any meaningful results. All religions are equally impotent. However, if we divide patients between one group that is prayed over, and another that obtains the benefits acquired by those "atheist materialist scientists" -- antibiotics, CAT scans, MRIs, saline solutions, dopamine, and surgery -- we see a significant difference in recovery rates.

To the degree that evangelicals attempt to denigrate "atheist materialist science", to that degree these evangelicals are putting barriers between the people whose lives and well-being are at risk and the answers that might actually help them.

It does not matter to me whether the doctor or the nurse believes in a God. I am not saying that a person must be an atheist to be a good doctor or a nurse. In fact, I will insist that such a statement is false. However, the good doctor or nurse does have to be able to read, understand, and apply the findings of the "atheist materialist scientists" who are working to discover the material causes and effects of changes in and to the human body.

Ultimately, the biggest threat to Lesley's life and well-being is ignorance. She will live or die according to how much those "atheist materialist scientists" have figured out about people in her position. She will live or die depending on how much her doctors and nurses understand of what has been learned. How much they understand will depend on how much society has promoted and encouraged its members to study whe findings of these "atheist materialist scientists."

I am not writing these blog entries to present cute little word games. These are issues of life and death -- real lives, and real death, and the quality of the lives that we can live.

Aftermath: March 15, 2006

My wife is home from the hospital and resting. She is missing a gall bladder, and now has a pacemaker. After the incision to install the pacemaker heals, the doctors say that she will be able to continue her life with no restrictions (other than avoiding strong magnetic fields).

The research that those "atheist materialist scientists" conducted -- looking for natural causes for natural events -- were entirely responsible for the fact that she has come home healthy. Those who want their loved ones to come home healthy as well have every reason to make sure that those "atheist materialist scientists" are able to continue to do their work unimpeded.

Indeed, anybody who cares about curing the sick needs to care that we have more, not fewer, "atheist materialist scientists" out there.

Subverting Democracy

I read a news report today saying that the Bush Administration is going after "leaks" with a vengeance.

After having been stung by reports of extraordinary rendition (kidnapping citizens of allied countries and shipping them to countries such as Syria, Afghanistan, and Egypt for torture), torture sometimes until death, secret Presidential orders suspending the 4th Amendment to the Constitution – an amendment that specifically states that there will be no spying on Americans without a warrant, and similar embarrassments, the Administration wants to take steps to make sure no more information gets out.

First, one has to wonder, with these being the types of things that the Bush Administration has already been caught in, we must now ask what else is out there that it is trying to hide.

Second, there are two issues associated with this.

Hypocrisy

First, with this crack down on leaks, what is the Administration going to do the next time it wants to reveal the identity of a covert CIA operative where it is useful in embarrassing a critic of the Administration?

This Administration that is cracking down on leaks is also an administration that leaks information when it serves a political purpose. Yet, it is doubtful that this crackdown will include those within the administration who has authorized or participated in these leaks.

This suggests that the Bush Administration is not actually interested in a crackdown against leaks. "Leaking information to the press" and “receiving leaked information” are not the crimes that this administration is actually seeking to punish. Rather, the crimes it seeks to punish are "revealing and/or receiving information that embarrasses the Administration". Those who leak information in ways that benefit the Administration will get an instant get-out-of-jail-free card. Only those who give information opposed to the Administration will be tracked down and punished.

This means that reporters, when they receive information, are going to have to make an evaluation. After hearing classified information, they will have to ask themselves, "Does this benefit the Administration?" If it does, then they will be able to receive the information and print it without repercussions.

If, however, they see the information as damaging to the Administration, they should take this as evidence that they are taking their freedom into their own hands if they should let the information out.

From this, we can rest assured that we, the public, are going to hear more pro-Administration information and less anti-Administration information. From this, we are somehow supposed to make an informed decision as to the quality of the work that this Administration does.

Furthermore, the question still remains: Given what we have learned about this Administration as a result of these leaks -- the torture of prisoners sometimes to death, spying on Americans, extraordinary renditions, and the like -- this still raises questions about what this Administration is doing that we have not yet heard about. These draconian measures are being used to keep people silent about something. What is it?

Democracy

Second, there is a fundamental conflict between a secret government and a democratic nation. In a democracy, the people decide what type of government they want. It is axiomatic that the people cannot make an informed decision unless they have information. Controlling information is a way of controlling the voter. It is a tool in an attempt to undermine democracy by depriving the people of the most important thing they need to make democracy work.

Clearly, the government must keep some information secret. In World War II, it would have been stupid for the government to announce that it was considering a plan to land forces on Normandy Beach on June 6th, 1942. Nor does it make sense to say that the government should have announced to the world that it had broken the Nazi Enigma code and was listening in on German communications.

Anybody who attempts to portray the objections to Bush's secrecy in these terms is missing the point. There were no questions about the moral legitimacy of landing allied troops at Normandy or of listening in on German military communications. These were, of course, perfectly legitimate activities.

However, the Bush Administration is not complaining about the exposure of clearly legitimate military plans. Instead, the Bush Administration is embarrassed precisely by the fact that it has been caught red-handed in actions that many Americans consider to be immoral – and which some would not want to support with their vote.

The problem with the American public learning about the NSA wiretapping is not that some secret (but clearly legitimate) operation has been revealed. The problem is that the people learned that the Bush Administration was doing something that they could not support.

The problem with extraordinary rendition, secret prisons, and torture until death is not that somebody revealed a daring military plan. It is that somebody exposed activities that many Americans who would otherwise support Bush would not be able to support.

The Bush Administration is not seeking to deceive the enemy in the war on terror as much as he is attempting to deceive the American voter. In this, the Bush Administration is subverting democracy. It is trying to people to vote for something by hiding the fact that it contains elements that those same people would vote against. In short, it seeks to gain votes under false pretext, creating a government that does not, in fact, represent the will of the people.

Summary

These points simply highlight another instance of Bush hypocrisy. The Administration claims that it is pro-Democracy. Yet, in its actions, it subverts democracy.

Democracy requires informed and knowledgeable voters. The Bush Administration need not tell the voters everything that it is doing. However, it has an obligation to tell the voters the moral principles that it will use in making those decisions.

This Administration lies. The leaks that have come to light are leaks that show that this Administration is evil by its own standards of right and wrong -- or at least the standards they profess up until the leak is known.

This still leaves us with one unanswered question. Since we know that this Administration has no moral compass, and that its primary interest in blocking leaks is to prevent the people from learning about the immoral activities it is engaged in, what other immoral activities are they trying to hide?