Maverick Philosopher

Is the obligation to know the law a moral obligation, a legal obligation, or both? But we ought not assume that there are any moral obligations apart from legal obligations.

Suppose, then, that the only obligations there are are legal obligations: there are no moral obligations as a species of extra-legal obligations. There are no obligations logically antecedent to legal obligations. On this supposition, to be obligated to do X is to be legally obligated to do X in the sense that if there were no positive law that expressed the obligation to do X, then there would be no obligation to do X. Accordingly, the supposition is that obligatoriness collapses into legal obligatoriness.

Now if all obligations are legal obligations, if obligatoriness just is legal obligatoriness, and there is an obligation to know the law, then this obligation is a legal obligation. If so, this obligation must be codified in some law L that mandates that one ought to know the law. L, then, is the positive law that states that one ought to know the law. It follows that L mandates that one know all laws including L. Thus L mandates that one know that L is a law and what it requires. It mandates that one know that it is legally required that knowledge of the laws is legally required.

Now either I know L or I don't. If I don't, then I should since ignorance of the law is no excuse. But how can I be obligated to know a law that I do not know when my obligation to know the law is not something antecedent to the positive law but is expressed only in the actual positive law? This is what is puzzling me.

I am obligated to know L. But this obligation can only be a legal obligation on our supposition. Thus there is a law, namely L, that legally obligates me to know it. But I can be under this obligation only if I know L. If I don't know L I am under no obligation to know it. This is because, on our supposition, the obligation toknow L cannot be logically antecedent to L.

I conclude that our supposition is false, the supposition that the only obligations there are are legal obligations. The obligation to know the law cannot be a legal obligation; it must be a moral obligation. It follows that the moral is logically antecedent to the legal, and does not collapse into the legal.

Now I am quite convinced (for other reasons) that the moral is logically antecedent to the legal. But I am not so sure that above reasoning is correct or even clear enough to be evaluated.

Take 'fact.' For some, it is a matter of definition that a fact is a true proposition. But as I use the term, a fact is the truth-maker of a true proposition. Suppose you use 'fact' as interchangeable with 'true proposition.' Then I can accommodate you by distinguishing between facts-that and facts-of. Thus, the fact that Bill is blogging is made true by the fact of Bill's blogging. But we must sort out these definitional questions if we are to make any progress with the substantive issues. A substantive question would be: Are there facts? Obviously, we cannot make any headway with this until we agree on how we are using 'facts.'

The same holds no matter what the subject matter, and understanding this is a mark of an educated person. There is no point in debating whether Obama is a socialist until one has defined or at least explained 'socialist.' Would that the gasbags of contemporary punditry appreciated this simple point!

Returning to 'fact,' if you say that a fact is a true proposition, then I will ask you how you are using 'proposition.' Do you mean the sense of a context-free declarative sentence? Are propositions for you abstract objects? Are you Fregean when it comes to propositions? But now we need to get clear about 'abstract' and 'object.' Do you use 'object' and 'entity' interchangeably? Or can there be objects that are not entities and entities that are not objects? (An hallucinated pink rat might count as an object that is not an entity, and a being that has never been the accusative of any intellect might count as an entity that is not an object.) Someone who uses 'object' in such a way that there is no object without a (thinking) subject is not misusing the word: that is a traditional use. But equally, a person who uses 'object' to mean entity is not misusing it either. So the use of 'object' needs clarification.

'Object' is used in at least three ways, none of them wrong: (i) object = entity; (ii) object = intentional object = accusative of a mental act; (iii) object = particular. I just used 'particular.' But what is a particular? I would explain 'particular' by contrast to 'universal' and say that a particular is any item that is unrepeatable, while a universal is any item that is repeatable.

I just used the word 'item.' What do I mean by that? As I use it, 'item' is the most noncommittal of terms, the ultimate in terminological neutrality. It does not beg any questions or import any theories. An entity (from L. entitas, from ens, being) is anything that exists or has being, with 'existence' and 'being' being used interchangeably. 'Item,' however, is broader than 'entity' since an item may or may not exist. An item is anything one can think about or refer to in any way. Suppose a Meinongian distinguishes among existence, being, and Aussersein (extrabeing). Then 'item' is neutral with respect to that three-fold distinction. 'Item' commits me to nothing except self-identity. Cf. Latin idem. An item is an item. No item is self-diverse. Self-diversity is of course an item, but it is not self-diverse! Why is self-diversity an item? Because I just referred to it. Nothing is self-diverse, and nothing can be self-diverse, so this 'property' cannot be a property of anything. Yet we are now thinking about it and saying truth things about it: self-diversity is not self-diverse; it is what it is; it is not possibly instantiated; it is diverse from self-identity; etc.

But what about the Meinongian item, the self-diverse item? Is it self-diverse or not? This looks to be a puzzle for a Meinongian, but since I am not a Meinongian I don't have to solve it.

Returning to 'abstract' and its opposite, one might use 'abstract' and 'concrete' as follows: X is abstract (concrete) iff X is causally inert (causally active/passive). But I know of at least one name philosopher who uses 'abstract' interchangeably with 'nonspatiotemporal.' On this usage, God would be an abstract object, while on the first definition God would be concrete.

Note that an abstract entity on either of these two definitions can be a substance (another word with about ten meanings!), i.e., a being capable of independent existence. But 'abstract' is used by philosophers as diverse as Hegel and Keith Campbell (the Aussie trope theorist) to refer to non-independent objects. And indeed, their use is the classical, and etymologically correct, use.

I have merely scratched the surface of terminological fluidity in philosophy. I could write pages more (and you hope I won't). The main point is that, before 'cutting loose,' one must carefully define one's terms and reflect on how they cohere with one another.

The Unavoidability of Terminological Fluidity

The fact of terminological fluidity is undeniable. It is unfortunate in that it impedes understanding and communication. Time is consumed by mere terminological clarification. But nothing can or should be done about it. For the terminology we craft, and the distinctions we draw, may limit or enable or otherwise interfere with the claims we advance. Suppose there were a Central Terminology Authority (CTA) and it ruled that 'exist' shall mean: to be instantiated. It would follow from this terminological fiat that no individual can exist. For it is obvious that no individual can be instantiated: 'Socrates has instances' is nonsense. And yet it makes sense to speak of the existence of individuals. Or if the CTA were to rule that 'cause; is to be defined as a relation between events, this would rule out agent causation, which is the classical notion of causation.

Terminological fluidity must be tolerated in a discipline as open-ended as philosophy. Kierkegaard compares philosophizing without dogma to sewing without a knot at the end of one’s thread. His thought is that the reasoning process must be anchored in premises whose truth is beyond question; otherwise, one will never arrive at a fixed conclusion. This invites the rebuttal that to philosophize with dogma is not to philosophize at all. Philosophy is radical reflection: it cannot take anything for granted, as immune from examination. This is the very idea of philosophy. If so, then a fixed and unquestionable terminology is as anathema to the true philosopher as unquestionable premises.

The requisites of an office are the properties that must be possessed by anything that occupies the office, if anything does occupy it. Thus, among the requisites of the office of U. S. president, there is the property of being at least 35 years of age. Among the requisites of the divine office we find the familiar omni-attributes or 'perfections,' omniscience, etc. Both the presidential and the divine offices are individual offices in the sense that, if they are occupied, then they are occupied by an individual. Note that the requisites of an individual office are first-level properties of the office-holders, if there are any.

Tichý finds two fallacies in the above Cartesian argument.

The first is that it assumes that existence is a first-level property, a property of individuals. For if existence is one of the requisites of the divine office, as it must be if existence is a perfection, then existence is a property that can be meaningfully attributed to individuals. But we have seen that for Tichý, existence is not a property of individuals but of offices. It is the second-level property of being-occupied.

The second mistake in the Cartesian argument is that it relies on the following fallacious argument-pattern:

P is a requisite of office O
Therefore
The occupant of O instantiates P.

The argument-form is indeed invalid. Let O be the office of King of France. Let P be being human. P is a requisite of O. But it doesn't follow that the occupant of the office of King of France is human. For there is no occupant. Similarly, even if existence were a requisite of the divine office, it would not follow that the occupant of the divine office exists. For the office may be unoccupied. All we can safely infer from the fact, if it is a fact, that existence is a requisite of the divine office is that, if the office is occupied, then the occupant exists.

This is a very old objection, and it strikes me as sound. The concept of God is the concept of a being possessing all perfections. Now let it be granted that existence is a perfection, a "great-making property" in Alvin Plantinga's phrase. From these premises we may validly infer that the concept of God is the concept of a being that exists, indeed, the concept of a being that is as inseparable from its existence as the idea of a mountain from the idea of a valley, to revert to a Cartesian analogy. Still, how does this get us to the conclusion that God exists? For all that this argument shows, the concept of God might fail of instantiation: there might not be anything that falls under it. If something instantiates the God-concept, then that thing has an essence which includes or entails existence. But from this one cannot validly infer that something does instantiate the God-concept, or occupy the divine office.

Of course, Tichy does not grant that existence is a perfection, a great-making property of God. For his whole point is that existence cannot be attributed to individuals. This yields a much more radical objection to the Cartesian ontological argument, an objection one finds already in Frege, but not before Frege: Kant does not anticipate Frege's exact point about existence, contrary to what many, including Tichy, think. (To establish this would require a separate post.) In The Foundations of Arithmetic, we read, "Because existence is a property of concepts, the ontological argument for the existence of God breaks down." (p. 65) This amounts to a very radical criticism since it implies that 'God exists,' interpreted as the attribution of existence to an individual is meaningless.

Now I reject this more radical Fregean objection to the ontological argument. First, it implies a theory of existence open to powerful objections, a couple of which are sketched here. Second, the argument for it is not compelling, as explained here.

Thus few if any will say that Jones, an adult human, lacks the right to life when he is sleeping, or passed out drunk, or under general anaesthetic, or temporarily incapacitated due to an auto crash, or having a serious stroke or heart attack, or reversibly comatose, or in some similar state. Nor would we say that Jones' right to life varies with his alertness (or any other mental variable) or his age. Suppose a male is at his prime (all things considered) at age 50. Few would say that a person under or over 50 has less of a right to life. And if anyone were to say that, I wouldn't consider it worthwhile to discuss moral questions with him.

RP, explicitly stated, is CP. Now suppose someone, call him 'Peter,' tries to mount an argument against CP. He begins by reminding us of a couple of conceptual truths:

CT1. A capacity C's being unexercised at time t excludes C's being exercised at t. (This is an analog of the principle that a thing's being a potential F at t excludes its being an actual F at t.)

CT2. The properties that make an exercised capacity exercised, or supervene upon a capacity's being exercised are not properties of the corresponding unexercised capacity. (This is an analog of the principle that the properties that make an actual F actual are not properties of the same thing when it was potentially F.)

From these conceptual truths, Peter then infers that CP is false. He reasons as follows. "Since the right to life supervenes upon the exercise of such capacities as rationality, agency, and the ability to make and implement plans, there is no right to life when none of them are being exercised." Suppose Peter's argument is sound and shows that CP is false. Then Peter's argument will have 'proved too much': it will have proved that RP is also false since CP is just an explicit statement of RP.

Of course, Peter might bite the bullet in one of two ways. He might concede that RP entails CP and reject both of them. Or he might cleave to RP while prising it apart from CP. He would then be holding RP in tandem with CCP. Either way, I would consider the discussion to be at an end. For then we would lack common moral ground for profitable discussion.

The right thing to say is that a person's right to life, which supervenes upon such capacities as rationality and agency, is had by the person not just at the times at which the capacities are exercised but at other times as well. It is the person's having of the capacity (whether exercised or not) that confers the right to life.

Young children lack even the capacities associated with moral personhood and rights-possession. But they have a second-order capacity, the capacity to develop these capacities. The potentialist grounds the right to life in the potential to develop the first-order capacities. If one argues against the potentialist by invoking the truisms that the potential is not actual and the properties of the actual are not properties of the potential, then one should also argue that first-order capacities are not enough to ground a right to life, and that the actual exercise of these capacities is necessary. But then one must accept the counterintuitive consequence that a person's right to life is had by him only when he is fully exercising such capacities as rationality, agency, and the ability to make and implement plans.

In numerous previous posts, with the help of commenters, I have made precise the sense of 'potentiality' in play in PA and PP and have refuted various objections to PP including Joel Feinberg's "logical point," Peter Lupu's somewhat similar objection, as well as some of the probative overkill or proves-too-much objections. There is still an objection or two to turn aside, but the time has come to give positive arguments for PP.

To understand PP one must understand that it grounds the pre-natal right to life in the very potentiality of a genetically human individual to develop, in the normal course of events, into a being that actually possesses such rights-conferring properties as rationality. Therefore, if there are any post-natal genetically human individuals to which we ascribe rights on the basis of their potentiality to develop into individuals that actually possess rights-conferring properties, then subscription to PP is already a fact and its extension to the pre-natal cases will be mandatory unless there can be shown to be a morally relevant difference between the pre-natal and the post-natal cases. Now there are such post-natal cases. Therefore, since we already accept and apply PP to these post-natal cases, we ought to apply it to the pre-natal cases as well unless there is a morally relevant difference between the two sorts of case.

Consider post-natal humans from birth on to the age of seven or so. Do they have rights? Liberals, who believe in all sorts of rights, will presumably maintain that children have rights to health care, education, food, shelter, clothing and what all else. But underlying all of these is surely the right to life without which none of the others has any purchase. Now what is the basis for ascribing rights to neonates or one year olds? They cannot walk or talk, syllogize or philosophize. Chess is out of the question as is cell phone use. They cannot even control their bowels. They are helpless and in a sense good-for-nothing. They don't cook or clean or shop or work or pay taxes. They are more useless than cats who at least can fend for thmselves and control the rodent population. There is little that is actual about them. They don't realize much value or exercise the capacities that confer value or a right to life. And yet, as matter of fact, we consider them precious.

On what basis, then, do we ascribe value and rights to them? We value them for their promise and potentiality. We value them for what they will, in the normal course of events, become. I am not saying that there is nothing actual in young children that we value. We may value their openness to experience, their curiosity, their ability to learn, their sheer existence. But their potentiality outweighs their actuality and this potentiality is the ground of our ascription to them of the right to life and other rights that presuppose this fundamental right. So my first argument goes like this:

1. We ascribe the right to life to neonates and young children on the basis of their potentialities.
2. There is no morally relevant difference between neonates and young children and fetuses.
3. Principles -- in this case PP -- should be applied consistently to all like cases.
Therefore
4. We should ascribe the right to life to fetuses on the basis of their potentialities.

What I am arguing is that we already do accept PP and that we ought to be consistent in its application. To refuse to apply PP to the pre-natal cases is to fail to apply the principle consistently.

"I will not weaponize space," said Obama recently. That empty promise comes too late, and is irresponsible to boot: if our weapons are not there, theirs will be.

The very notion that outer space could be reserved for wholly peaceful purposes shows a deep lack of understanding of the human condition. Show me a space with human beings in it and I will show you a space that potentially if not actually is militarized and weaponized. Man is, was, and will be a bellicose son of a bitch. If you doubt this, study history, with particular attention to the 20th century. You can bet that the future will resemble the past in this respect. Note that the turn of the millenium has not brought anything new in this regard. Older is not wiser. All spaces, near, far, inner, outer, are potential scenes of contention, which is why I subscribe to the Latin saying:

Si vis pacem, para bellum.

If you want peace, prepare for war.

One must simply face reality and realize that the undoubtedly great good of peace comes at a cost, the cost of a credible defense. A credible defense is what keeps aggressors at bay. I mean this to hold at all levels, intrapsychically, interpersonally, intranationally, internationally, and in every other way. Weakness provokes. Strength pacifies. That is just the way it is. Conservatives, being reality-based, understand what eludes leftists who are based in u-topia (nowhere) and who rely on their unsupportable faith in the inherent goodness of human beings.

Here we have one of those deep differences between conservatives and leftists. Vote for the candidate of your choice, but just understand what set of ideas and values you are voting for.

The argumentative structure of this passage may be set forth as follows:

1. If God were an individual, then it would be a contingent matter whether God is benevolent.
2. It is not a contingent matter whether God is benevolent.
-----
3. God is not an individual.

(2) is readily granted, but (1) is hardly self-evident. Why can't it be the case that God is necessarily benevolent but also an individual? Tichý appears to be assuming that all individuals are 'bare,' where a bare individual is one that has the following features: (i) it lacks a nature or essence and is therefore not a substance in Aristotle's sense of prote ousia; (ii) the properties it has are not rooted in it or emergent from it but tied to it by an external tie of exemplification; (iii) the properties it has are all accidental, none are essential. Tichý's statment that "any individual is conceivably malicious" is what commits him to a doctrine of bare individuals. What he means, of course, is that any individual is possibly such as to lack any property it actually possesses, and possibly such as to possess any property it actually lacks. (To make this rigorous we probably have to add: any property that it not trivial or transcendental such as self-identity.)

Some philosophers argue that bare individuals are incoherent. But this is not at all clear since noted philosophers have plausibly defended them. Gustav Bergmann famously championed them under the moniker 'bare particulars' and David Armstrong finds use for what he calls 'thin particulars.' J. P. Moreland ably defends them in his Universals, p. 148 ff. et passim. I discuss them favorably in sections 7 and 11 of Chapter VI of A Paradigm Theory of Existence. Of course, to understand bare individuals you must not confuse them with what could be called 'nude individuals,' individuals having no properties at all. Obviously, all individuals come 'clothed' in properties. The question concerns how they have their properties. Let us provisionally grant that there are bare individuals and that all individuals are bare. The rest of Tichý's argument is as follows:

4. Either God is an individual or God is an office.
3. God is not an individual.
-----
5. God is an office.

'God,' therefore, does not name an individual, but an office, and the existence of God is not the existence of an individual, but the being-occupied of the divine office. But this is puzzling. If God is an office, then what should we call the individual that fills the office if the office is filled? No doubt, if God exists, then the divine office is filled. But filled by what? The office is obviously distinct, really distinct, from the office-holder, and the office-holder is not a mere feature or property of the office. Presumably, what Tichý must say is that the divine office, if filled, is filled by a bare individual. He cannot say that it is filled by God, for God is the divine office and this office does not fill itself. So the divine office, if filled, is filled by a bare individual.

Now this bare individual — which we cannot name — instantiates the requisites of the divine office but does so accidentally because it is bare. Among the requisites of the divine office are omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. So the bare individual which holds, fills, or occupies the divine office is accidentally omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Since this bare individual is what instantiates the omni-attributes, it ought to be called 'God.' But it cannot be called 'God' if the (1)-(3)argument above is sound. And it cannot be called 'God' for the further reason that God possesses his omni-attributes essentially.

The divine office itself, of course, is constituted by the requisites of omnscience, omnipotence and omnibenevolence, but it does not instantiate them: the divine office is not omniscient any more than the office of U. S. president is a U. S. citizen. So how can God be the divine office as Tichy maintains? God is omniscient, but the divine office is not.

My conclusion is that Tichy's conception of God is incoherent. He is driven to say that 'God' does not denote an individual but an office. But if God is the divine office, then he cannot instantiate the omni-attributes: no office instantiates its requisites any more than a concept instantiates its Fregean marks (Merkmalen). (The concept bachelor, for example, has male as a mark, but no concept is male.) On the other hand, if God, as one might naturally suppose, is the office-holder of the divine office, then God is a bare individual who has his attributes accidentally, which is absurd, as Tichy himself points out.

Could God be the divine office together with its office-holder? This is not what Tichy says, and in any case it would destroy the divine unity and necessity. God is a necessary being, but Tichy cannot make sense of this. For whatever instantiates the requisites of the divine office contingently instantiates them due to the fact that any office-holder of the divine office must be a bare individual. But this is equivalent to saying that God exists contingently if he exists.

This is an old argument that has been given too many times by too many philosophers, some of them distinguished, for example, by A. J. Ayer in Language, Truth, and Logic, p. 43. The argument can be set forth most perspicuously as follows:

1. If existence were a property of individuals, then affirmative singular existentials would be tautologies and negative singular existentials would be contradictions.
2. It is not the case that affirmative singular existentials are tautologies and negative singular existentials contradictions.
Therefore
3. Existence is not a property of individuals.

Although this oft-repeated argument is valid in point of logical form, it is a very bad argument. I of course concede the minor. The general affirmative existential 'Cats exist' is not a tautology, and neither is the singular affirmative existential 'Felix exists.' And the general negative existential "Three-headed dogs do not exist' is not a contradiction any more than the singular negative existential 'Cerberus does not exist.' The problem resides with the major premise.

What I will argue (and have argued in A Paradigm Theory of Existence, pp. 113-114) is that premise (1) rests on the ancient modal fallacy of confusing the necessity of the consequent (necessitas consequentiis) with the necessity of the consequence (necessitas consequentiae).

(1) derives whatever force it has from a paradoxical feature of reference. Given that there is no reference to the nonexistent, if I say of an existing thing that it exists, it seems I have said nothing, or at least nothing that can fail to be true; and if I say of an existing thing that it does not exist, then it seems I have said something that cannot fail to be false. Thus it seems that attributions of existence to individuals are tautologically and thus necessarily true, and that denials of existence to individuals are self-contradictory and thus necessarily false.

To see why (1) is false we must distinguish between sentences and the propositions they are used to express, and keep in mind the modal fallacy mentioned. One commits the fallacy if one makes the inferential move from 'Necessarily, if p then p' to 'If p, then necessarily p.' For example, it is necessarily true that if I am sitting, then I am sitting. But it does not follow that if I am sitting, then necessarily I am sitting -- surely I might not have been sitting.

Sentences of the form a exists (where 'a' is a nonvacuous individual constant) have the peculiarity that they cannot be used to express a falsehood. Sentences of this form can thus be said, in a loose sense, to be necessarily true. But all this means, speaking strictly, is that necessarily, if a sentence S of this form is used, then the proposition expressed by S is true. This, however, does not entail that the proposition expressed by S is necessarily true. To think otherwise is to commit the above modal fallacy.

Although it is true that, necessarily, every use of a sentence of the form a exists expresses a true proposition, it does not follow that every use of a sentence of the form a exists expresses a necessarily true proposition. The necessity of the consequence does not entail the necessity of the consequent.

To put it another way, it is pragmatically impossible for one to use 'Socrates exists' or 'I exist' to express a false proposition; hence it is pragmatically necessary that whenever one uses such a sentence one expresses a true proposition. But the pragmatics of sentence utterance has no bearing on the modal status of propositions. The possibility of my nonexistence is not ruled out by the pragmatic impossibility of my using 'I do not exist' to express a true proposition.

So (1) above is false and Tichý's argument collapses. We have been given no good reason to think that existence is not a property -- in a suitably broad sense -- of individuals.

Let Tom be our example. Tom could be a man, a cat, a tomato; it doesn't matter as long as we are talking about a concrete individual. (Tichý uses the dated example of Jimmy Carter.) We can and do say of an individual that it is red, ripe, benevolent, bald, blue-eyed, etc. Saying such things we ascribe properties to individuals. But if we say of an individual that it exists, are we ascribing the property of existence to the individual? Does 'Tom exists' ascribe the property of existence to Tom? Is existence a property of individuals? (Please don't confuse this question with the question whether existence is a property. Existence could be a property by being a property of a non-individual such as a property.)

I think it is obvious that existence cannot be a property of individuals in exactly the same way or in exactly the same sense of 'property' that redness, ripeness, etc. are properties of individuals. Every philosopher worth his salt is alive to the distinction between what a thing is and whether it is and the equivalent distinction between describing a thing and saying that there is a thing of a certain description. This all well understood, one could still maintain that there is a sense in which existence is a property of individuals.

Tichý, however, takes a more radical tack that is very similar to the Frege-Russell line. Both Frege and Russell denied that existence is a first-level property, a property of individuals. Their view is not merely that existence is not a property that could enter into an individual's description, but that it is not a propery of individuals at all. What existence is is a second-level property, a property of concepts, properties, propositional functions, descriptions and cognate items. Thus both of these luminaries of logic deny that existence can be meaningfully attributed to individuals. One cannot meaningfully say 'Socrates exists,' for example, or 'This tomato exists.' Russell famously opines that 'Socrates exists' is on all fours with 'Socrates is numerous.' But one could meaningfully say 'Philosophers exist' or 'Tomatoes exist.' For what one is doing when one says that philosophers exist is talking about the concept philosopher and saying of it that it is instantiated. In Russellian jargon, one is saying that the propositional function x is a philosopher is sometimes true.

Tichý's doctrine of existence is essentially the Frege-Russell doctrine dressed up in different terminology. Where Frege and Russell have concepts and propositional functions, Tichý has offices a term he uses in an extended sense. Thus one can speak not only of the office of president but also of the 'office' of Richard Burton's wife, an erstwhile 'office-holder' of which was Elizabeth Taylor. "Existence is a perfectly good property, only a property instantiable not by individuals but by offices capable of being filled by individuals." (p. 407) As I see it, the difference between Frege and Tichý is merely terminological:

FREGE: Affirmative existentials affirm instantiation of concepts, and negative existentials deny instantiation of concepts.

TICHY: Affirmative existentials affirm being-filled of offices, and negative existentials deny being-filled of offices.

For Tichy, then, existence is a property all right, but it is a property of offices, not of individuals. Existence is the property of having an occupant. Accordingly, 'The U. S. president exists' affirms of the office or role of U. S. president that it has an occupant, and 'The king of France does not exist' denies of the office or role of king of France that it has an occupant. In neither case is reference made to any particular individual. So although G. W. Bush is the present president of the U. S., 'The U. S. president exists' is not about him but about the role that he happens at present to occupy.

An important distinction in Frege is that between the marks (Merkmalen) of a concept (Begriff) and the properties (Eigenschaften) of a concept. To coin an example, the concept bachelor has unmarried and male among its marks just as the concept cygnet has swan among its marks. But no concept is either unmarried or male or a swan. Thus the marks of these concepts are not among their properties. Conversely, being instantiated, which is a property of both bachelor and cygnet, is not a mark of either.

Tichý makes the same distinction but couches it in different terminology. Instead of speaking of the marks of a concept, he speaks of the requisites of an office. "In general, the requisite of an office is any property such that, for any world w and time t, if x occupies the office in w at t then x instantiates the property in w at t." (408) And instead of speaking of the properties of a concept, Tichý speaks of an office instantiating a property.

FREGE: The properties of a concept are not among its marks, and the marks of a concept are not among its properties. For example, being instantiated and being immaterial are not among the marks of the concept cat, and being an animal and being four-footed are not among the properties of the concept cat. No concept is four-footed or an animal. And if being immaterial were among the marks of cat, then anything that is a cat would be immaterial, which is absurd.

TICHY: The properties of an office are not among its requisites, and the requisites of an office are not among its properties. For example, one of the requisites of the office of U. S. president is being a U. S. citizen. But the office itself is not a U. S. citizen. And the properties of the office, such as being filled or being temporarily vacant, cannot possibly be properties of any office-holder. Bush may be 'vacant,' but not in the sense here in play.

Tichy thus repackages Frege's Merkmal/Eigenschaft distinction in different terms. Applying the distinction to existence, we can say that for Tichý existence can be ascribed to an office, but it cannot be a requisite of an office. "It would be ridiculous to insist, for instance, that in order for an individual to be the U. S. president, he must, aside from being human, a U. S. citizen, etc., also exist." (409) To put this in Fregean lingo: existence can be ascribed to a concept, it can be a property of a concept, but it cannot be a mark of a concept. It would be ridiculous to insist that for an individual to instantiate the concept cat, it must, besides being four-footed, an animal, etc., also exist.

Critique

It is precisely here that I must object most strenuously to both Frege and to Tichý. Is it not the most obvious thing in the world that Bush cannot occupy any office unless he exists? Or that an individual cannot instantiate the concept cat unless the individual exists? How can it be reasonably denied that existence is a requisite or a prerequisite for any individual's falling under a concept or filling an office? It is this simple fact that Frege, Russell, Tichy, and innumerable others are blind to. Of course, if you rule that existence can only be a property of concepts, properties, propositional functions, Tichian offices, or cognate items, then you simply, by this fiat, ENFORCE the absurdity of attributions of existence to individuals. For if existence is the being-instantiated of a concept, then, from the plain fact that no individual is a concept, it straightaway follows that it is absurd, a category mistake, to attribute existence to individuals. But this enforcement move has all the advantages of theft over honest toil to cop a phrase Lord Russell himself employed in a different connection.

I am not denying that '___exist(s)' sometimes functions as a second-level predicate as in 'Philosophers exist.' My point is that it also has an irreducible first-level use as in 'Peter exists.' When I say of Peter that he exists, I am not saying of some office that it is filled by Peter. For what office would that be, even acquiescing in Tichy's extended use of 'office'? Is there a Peter-office or a Peter-role? Peter is an individual and it is not at all clear how Peter's being Peter could be an office or a role, or how his existence could be the filling of, or playing of, a role. Can any role nail down the haecceity of an individual?

Well, suppose there is a Peter-office and that Peter occupies it. Still, he must exist in order to occupy it, and this his existence cannot be the being-occupied of the role without vicious circularity. You move in a circle of embarrassingly short diameter if you say that Peter's existence is his occupation of a role when he must exist in order to occupy any role.

More of this critique later. I need to get a bike ride in before the sun sets. Perhaps I will blog my way through the whole of Tichy's article.

0. The actual world is the total way things are. A merely possible world is a total way things might have been. Let that be our intuitive starting point.

1. The actual world is a possible world. This is because everything actual is possible. But of course the actual world is not merely possible. Mere possibility and actuality are mutually exclusive.

2. There is a plurality of possible worlds. This is because the possible outruns the actual: the set of actualia is a proper subset of the set of possibilia. So if there are possible worlds at all, there are many of them. If you say that there is only one possible world, the actual world, then that leads to the collapse of modal distinctions, or, to put it less dramatically, the extensional equivalence of the possible, the actual, and the necessary. Not good. But I will not here argue for the reality of modal distinctions. That is something we are now presupposing.

3. There is and can be only one actual world. This follows from the maximality property of worlds. Whatever one's exact conception of a world, worlds are all-inclusive totalities. (So much is built into the very word, 'world.') If a world is a(n abstract) state of affairs, as A. Plantinga maintains, then it must be a maximal state of affairs: one that includes every state of affairs with which it is logically consistent. If a world is a (Fregean) proposition, then it must be a maximal proposition: one that entails every proposition with which it is logically consistent. If a world is a mereological sum of concreta, as D. Lewis holds, then it must be a maximal mereological sum of concreta. These maximal objects are so big that, to employ a chemical metaphor, they are 'saturated': adding another member to them would 'precipitate' a contradiction. So there cannot be two or more actual worlds.

4. There must be an actual world. It cannot be the case that every world is merely possible. If every world were merely possible, then that would be the case, actually the case, which implies that the total way things are would include its actually being the case, which implies that there is, after all, an actual world. So it cannot be the case that every world is merely possible. Think about it.

5. Possibilities come in world-sized packages: necessarily, if state of affairs S is possible, then there is a world W such that W includes S. This amounts to a denial of 'isolated' or 'worldless' possibilities. I am now blogging, but I might have been now sleeping, where 'now' picks out the very same time. Let S = BV's sleeping now. Had S been actual now, everything would have been different in a few major ways and in an infinity of miniscule ways. So if I had been sleeping now a world different from the world that is actual would have been actual.

6. Actuality is absolute, not world-relative. If by #2 there is a plurality of possible worlds, and by #3 there is only one actual world, then there is a distinction between merely possible worlds and that privileged possible world that is the actual world. Although every world is actual at itself, only one world is actual simpliciter, actual period. Compare: although every time is present at itself, only one time is present simpliciter. This comparison of course assumes (controversially) that the B-theory of time is false, the theory according to which time is exhausted by McTaggart's B-series, the series of events ordered by the relations earlier than, later than, and simultaneous with. I am assuming that in addition to the B-relations there are also the monadic A-properties of pastness, presentness, and futurity, and that these properties are instantiated. 'Now' of course is an indexical expression: it picks out the time of its tokening. Tokened at midnight, it picks out midnight, at noon, noon. But is 'actual' an indexical? Does its reference depend on the context of utterance so that, tokened in this world it refers to this world, tokened in another, to that other? That's what David Lewis maintains, but I say 'actual' is not an indexical. When I say that this world, our world, is actual, I mean to ascribe to it the monadic property of actuality, a property which only one world can have.

There are many possible worlds, but only one is actual. Furthermore, the one that is actual might not have been actual. So the one that is actual is contingently actual. If that were not the case, the merely possible worlds would not be possible. For whatever is possible, is possibly actual. The worlds that do not bear the privilege of actuality could have borne it.

7. X exists in/at world W =df were W actual, X would exist.

8. X is a contingent being =df X exists in some but not all possible worlds. It follows from this definition that something, Pegasus say, can be a contingent being even if it does not exist. If the word 'being' throws you, substitute 'item.'

9. X is a necessary being =df X exist in all possible worlds.

10. X is an impossible being =df X exists in no possible world.

11. X is actual =df X exists in thw actual world, the one world that happens to be actual.

12. Puzzle: It looks as if, on the one hand, 'The actual world is not actual' is a contradiction. On the other hand, it is surely the case that the actual world might not have been actual. The puzzle is solved by distinguishing two uses of 'the actual world.' It can be used as a Kripkean rigid designator that picks out one particular world, this world, our world, and does so in every possible world. Used in this way, 'The actual world is not actual' is possibly true. But 'the actual world' can also be used as a definite description that applies to whichever world happens to be actual. Used in this second way, 'The actual world is not actual' is a contradiction.

13. But what exactly is a possible world? I take an abstractist line. Worlds are maximal (Fregean) propositions or maximal (abstract) states of affairs. They are not maximal mereological sums of concreta, pace David Lewis. If worlds are propositions, then actuality is truth. That is one interesting consequence. Another is that worlds are abstract objects which implies that the actual world must not be confused either with the physical universe (the space-time-matter system) or with that plus whatever nonphysical concreta (minds) that there might be. And if worlds are abstract objects then they are necessary beings. (See #9 above.) So every possible world exists in every possible world.

If actuality is truth, and individuals cannot be true (in the exact sense in which a proposition can be true), then perhaps there is a problem with #11 above.

Peter maintains that possible worlds are "maximally consistent descriptions of the world." This is on the right track, except for a couple of problems. One is that descriptions are presumably linguistic entities. If so, they are contingent in which case they exist in only some possible worlds. I won't spell it out, but this seems to imply that possible worlds cannot be linguistic entities. They cannot be say maximally consistent sentences of English. The other problem is that 'world' occurs both in Peter's definiens and in his definiendum. Presumably, he doesn't mean to tell us that a possible world is a maximally consistent description of a maximally consistent description.

Now Peter, how much of the foregoing can you swallow?

A simple rule dictates my buying: Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful. And most certainly, fear is now widespread, gripping even seasoned investors. To be sure, investors are right to be wary of highly leveraged entities or businesses in weak competitive positions. But fears regarding the long-term prosperity of the nation’s many sound companies make no sense. These businesses will indeed suffer earnings hiccups, as they always have. But most major companies will be setting new profit records 5, 10 and 20 years from now.

Let me be clear on one point: I can’t predict the short-term movements of the stock market. I haven’t the faintest idea as to whether stocks will be higher or lower a month — or a year — from now. What is likely, however, is that the market will move higher, perhaps substantially so, well before either sentiment or the economy turns up. So if you wait for the robins, spring will be over.

[. . .]

In short, bad news is an investor’s best friend. It lets you buy a slice of America’s future at a marked-down price.

Over the long term, the stock market news will be good. In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts; the Depression; a dozen or so recessions and financial panics; oil shocks; a flu epidemic; and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.

You might think it would have been impossible for an investor to lose money during a century marked by such an extraordinary gain. But some investors did. The hapless ones bought stocks only when they felt comfort in doing so and then proceeded to sell when the headlines made them queasy.

Today people who hold cash equivalents feel comfortable. They shouldn’t. They have opted for a terrible long-term asset, one that pays virtually nothing and is certain to depreciate in value. Indeed, the policies that government will follow in its efforts to alleviate the current crisis will probably prove inflationary and therefore accelerate declines in the real value of cash accounts.

Equities will almost certainly outperform cash over the next decade, probably by a substantial degree. Those investors who cling now to cash are betting they can efficiently time their move away from it later. In waiting for the comfort of good news, they are ignoring Wayne Gretzky’s advice: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.”

I don’t like to opine on the stock market, and again I emphasize that I have no idea what the market will do in the short term. Nevertheless, I’ll follow the lead of a restaurant that opened in an empty bank building and then advertised: “Put your mouth where your money was.” Today my money and my mouth both say equities.

I have but one quibble. Mr. Buffett tells us that cash equivalents are "certain" to depreciate in value. How can he be so cocksure about that? Is he certain that deflation is not in our future? If he cannot predict the markets, as he says, then he can't predict interest rates either. Nevertheless, although one cannot be certain that deflation is not in the offing, it is more likely that continuing inflation is.

We discussed each of the foregoing, but this post will focus on (1). The question is not whether (1) is true or false, but whether it is meaningful. Now in one sense, (1) is perfectly meaningful: it is a grammatical English sentence and each word in it is meaningful. But the same is true of 'The average thought has a volume of two cubic centimeters.' The latter sentence, however, embodies a Rylean category mistake and is meaningless for that reason. The question is whether a similar sort of meaninglessness or incoherence infects (1). So the question is not whether (1) is true, or whether it is linguistically meaningful, but whether it picks out a coherent thought. I claimed that (1) picks out a coherent thought, while Peter disagreed with me.

My existence is an actual state of affairs and my nonexistence is a merely possible state of affairs. Peter agreed to this, and he agreed that 'I exist, but I might not have existed' is true in this parsing: I exist & possibly, I do not exist. This of course is not to be confused with Possibly (I exist & I do not exist.) And it is obvious to both of us that 'possibly' is to be read ontically, not epistemically, and as picking out broadly logical possiblity or what some call metaphysical possibility.

Thus there are two states of affairs, my existence and my nonexistence, the first actual, the second merely possible. Now it seems to me that these two states of affairs can be compared in respect of good and bad despite the fact that one is actual while the other is merely possible. Thus it seems to me that I can meaningfully compare my actual existence to my possible nonexistence and say of the latter that it is better than the former.

Of course, were I not to exist, then I would not be able to judge that my nonexistence was good. Only an existing person can make value judgments or any judgments. But I do exist, and given this fact, and given the fact that I am a contingent being and thus possibly such that I do not exist, I can make value judgments including the judgment that (since my life is a disaster in which pain and misery vastly outweigh pleasure and satisfaction) it would have been better had I never come into existence. So why should it be incoherent for me to assert (1)?

At one point in our dialog Peter seemed to be advancing the following argument:

A. If state of affairs S is better (or worse) than state of affairs S*, then either both S and S* are actual or both are merely possible.
B. It is not the case that either both my existence and my nonexistence are actual or both are merely possible.
-----
C. It is not the case that my existence is better or worse than my nonexistence.

This is a valid argument, but what reason do we have to accept (A)? Don't we routinely compare actual and merely possible states of affairs in terms of right and wrong, good and bad? Suppose I did something X that I regret having done. My having done X is actual while my refraining from doing X is merely possible; and yet I consider that it would have been better had I not done X. What is that if not a comparison of an actual and a merely possible state of affairs in respect of good and bad? Or consider a future state of things in which no one lies, steals, kills, or rapes. It seems meaningful to compare the actual state of things with this merely possible state of things and judge that the latter is better than the former.

Another point Peter made is that nothing has value or disvalue except relative to an evaluator: nothing is intrinsically valuable or the opposite. Be this as it may, how is it relevant to (1)? If I judge that it would have been better had I never existed, then there is an evaluator, namely me. The fact that, had this better state of affairs been actual, I would not have existed and would not have been able to make any judgments at all seems irrelevant.

But I may have missed Peter's arguments. If so, he can tell me what I have missed.

Peter begins his commentary as follows:

We agree that EPP is solid and it is indeed a conceptual truth about the concept of potentiality. So putative CEs are either (i) based on some temporal confusion; (ii) exploit the open boundaries in common usage between the concept of potentiality and other neighboring concepts, such as the concept of probability/likelihood, possibility, tendency, etc. I think EPP can be useful in establishing a clear demarcation line between the concept of potentiality in the developmental sense from other adjacent concepts.

In any case, I agree with your well put phrase that EPP is a clearer principle than any putative CEs to it would be. So the working hypothesis ought to be that any proposed CE is not a real one; we just need to find the reason why it appears to be a CE and defuse the apparent threat it poses that way.

I add the following. EPP, if true, is necessarily true, and we both agree that it is true. And I agree that it is plausibly viewed as a conceptual truth, a truth whose truth is grounded in the conceptual framework we ineluctably employ; although one might also see it as metaphysical truth, one whose truth is grounded in rerum natura. The difference is subtle and needn't detain us at the moment. Either way, EPP is a necessary truth, whatever the ground of the truth's necessity.

The main thing is that EPP is immune or at least highly resistant to counterexample: any putative counterexample will be less clear than the principle it purports to overthrow. In this respect it is like the Law of Non-Contradiction. The principle is innocent until proven guilty and the onus probandi surely rests on anyone who questions it. So I agree with Peter's "working hypothesis."

It is worth noting that EPP does not imply that there are any potentialities in nature. As a conceptual/metaphysical truth it is neutral on that question. 'If anything is a bachelor, then it is male' does not imply that there are bachelors; similarly, EPP does not imply that there are potentialities, powers, potencies -- call them what you will -- in nature. But we have been assuming all along that there are, and this assumption perhaps needs testing. Imagine a world in which there are no powers and no talk of powers. Is such a world coherently conceivable?

Furthermore, even if there are potentialities in nature, it does not follow that they are irreducible. The same goes for dispositions. The water-solubility of a sugar cube might be identified with, and thus reduced to, some categorical (non-dispositional) property of the cube's micro-structure. David Armstrong has a theory along these lines. Would the reducibility of dispositions and potentialities affect the Potentiality Argument? This needs to be explored. Peter continues:

Not so with EEPP; at least not at this stage. I am not as yet equally confident in EEPP; although, I must admit that I am somewhat more optimistic now than I was at any time since I originally proposed the principle. My optimism is based on the fact that thus far I do not see any viable CEs to EEPP. I also believe that Bob's point that EEPP is liable to collapse into EPP once clearly reformulated can be adequately repelled.

So I see two serious threats to EEPP.

(I) since the conjunction of EPP and EEPP contradicts the conjunction of the four principles you [BV] recently introduced, it follows that not all of them can be true. So if your four principles are unassailable, then either EPP or EEPP must be false. Since the former is unassailable, the suspicion is immediately directed toward EEPP. So this principle is the weaker of the two of my principles. Of course, conversely, I can maintain that both of my principles are true and try to find a weakness in one of your principles. I suspect I will eventually challenge at least the one about identity (forgot the name you gave to this principle). It seems to me at least now that it is the most vulnerable of the four.

(II) You might pursue a line of reasoning you expressed to me personally that relies on the normativity element in PP (i.e., the right to life). I suppose what you have in mind here is to argue that the restrictions EEPP imposes make sense when it comes to factual matters, but they do not apply at all or do not apply in the same manner when it comes to normative properties.

I think this is a viable line to pursue against EEPP and I am interested to see some of the details. Whether in the end this line of reasoning will defeat EEPP remains to be seen, but I am sure it can be extremely fruitful in furthering our understanding of the concept of potentiality, particularly when it comes to the interaction of this concept with normative concepts.

So this is how I see the current state of EEPP. Much more needs to be done and I hope that in the next couple of weeks I will have the time to review (I) and (II) and your principles and write something about the above lines of attack on EEPP.

Let me begin with the normativity point. Suppose EEPP is true. Then, to revert once again to our trusty acorn example, none of the properties in virtue of which an oak tree is an actual oak tree are properties of the acorn. Now note that EEPP is a non-normative proposition: it makes no mention of rights, duties, and suchlike. But PP (Every potential descriptive person has a right to life) is plainly a normative proposition. So an obvious question arises: how does the truth of EEPP (assuming it is true) exclude the truth of PP given that one of the principles is non-normative and the other normative?

Let {P1, P2, . . . , Pn} be the set of properties in virtue of which a descriptive person is an actual descriptive person. The property of having a right to life, a property ascribed by PP to every descriptive person, is not a member of this set. So even if EEPP is true, its truth is consistent wth the truth of PP. In other words, one cannot infer the negation of PP from EEPP. It seems to me that this refutes Peter's argument against PP unless he beefs it up with auxiliary premises.

A second problem with EEPP is that it appears to be a mere definitional truth if true at all. To understand EEPP, we must understand "properties in virtue of which something is a such-and-such." For example, the properties in virtue of which an oak tree is a(n actual) oak tree. But which properties are these? Being a living thing can't be one of them since the planted acorn is a living thing, even though no actual oak tree can fail to have this property. So they must be exactly the properties that the oak tree has but the acorn lacks. But then EEPP is as trivially true as EPP is. How could such a trivial truth entail the negation of PP?

No one 'up to speed' could possibly deny EPP. The same goes for EEPP understood as (I think) Peter understands it. But what does any of this have to do with PP?

Even if one's overall purpose is not destructive, a life devoted to a dominating purpose might nonetheless lack positive objective intrinsic value if the purpose is either trivial or futile. One hesitates to say that a life devoted to parsing every sentence in Moby Dick is objectively meaningful: such a life is squandered on a trivial pursuit. Intuitively, a purpose-driven life can be a wasted life. Or suppose the cynosure of one's efforts is something unattainable such as the squaring of the circle or the construction of a perpetuum mobile. A life devoted to the unattainable might not be trivial but it will be futile.

The futility/triviality contrast can be thrown into relief by comparing religious and nonreligious lives. Thomas Merton joined the Trappists as a relatively young man, and Edith Stein, the brilliant student of Husserl, entered the Carmelite Order. Did these outstanding individuals throw their lives away? Both lives were consecrated to the highest conceivable purpose: to serve, love, and know God. Their common purpose was the exact opposite of trivial. But the worldling will say that their lives were exercises in futility: they aimed at the unattainable since there is no God. There is only this world, and all attainable purposes are immanent to it. Merton and Stein walled themselves off from the only life there is and spent their lives in illusion. They renounced the very things that make life worth living: family life, children, freedom, career, sex and the pleasures of life.

But if the worldling is wrong, then no matter what world-immanent purpose he pursues, no matter how highly esteemed the purpose is in the eyes of the world, his life will be trivial. For if God exists, then any goal short of God is utterly trivial in comparison. ("What doth it profit a man, etc.") So if God exists, the worlding wastes his life just as surely as the committed religionist does if God does not exist.

There are at least four ways a life can be meaningless. A life is rendered meaningless by purposelessness or directionlessness. But a life is is also rendered meaningless by being misdirected in one of three ways: either misdirected to an evil purpose, or misdirected to a trivial purpose or misdirected to a futile purpose.

So I think we can safely reject this biconditional: A human life is meaningful if and only if its constituent activities, events and projects are animated and organized by a central purpose. To get a truth we must replace 'if and only if' with 'only if': having a purpose is necessary but not sufficient for existential meaningfulness. This implies that existential meaningfulness cannot be defined solely in terms of teleology. Axiology must be brought in.

But I hear an objection coming. "What you are saying is right if by 'meaningful' you mean objectively meaningful. However, it seems correct to say that a life is subjectively meaningful if and only if it is organized by a central purpose, one supplied by the agent of the life."

I reject the notion of subjective meaning. To say that a life has a subjective meaning is to say that it has no meaning at all. For if I must give my life meaning, then it has no meaning. This is explained more fully in Whether the Meaning of Life Could be Subjective.

I came to my views in the aftermath of the October 19, 1987 Black Monday crash. I was in my 30s in the '80s, and a few years before the crash of '87, I had decided that it was time to seriously apply myself to setting aside some loot for the geezer I hoped to turn into. Being a fiscal conservative, and thus very cautious, I put only a small amount of money into stock mutual funds. I was pleased with the return I was getting, but on Black Monday I panicked due to inexperience and excessive caution and I did something stupid: I liquidated my shares in a very good growth fund and retreated to a cash position.

That was a mistake because once on the sidelines it is very difficult to know when to get back into the game. Long story short, I missed out on a lot of the '90s gains. Here are some of the conclusions I came to, quickly stated, and no doubt in need of refinement, revision and amplification.

Some Principles of a Financial Conservative

1. One must decide on an asset allocation that fits one's psychology and is appropriate to one's age. By my count there are five main asset classes: stocks, bonds, cash and cash equivalents, real estate, and precious metals. There are fancier instruments, but never invest in what you don't understand. If you invest in four or five of the main asset classes you should do well in the long run. If you are conservative like me, you will want to limit your exposure to stocks to say, no more than 30% of your net worth. But of course it depends on how risk-averse you are and your age.

2. Should a person over 55 be in equities at all? Well, how long can you reasonably expect to live? 90 is not an unreasonable expectation for people nowadays. So if you are 60, then you might have 30 years left. Given that fact, I would say it would be foolish not to have some of your money in equities. But as you get older you should shift your asset allocation away from stocks (equities).

Suppose you are 80 and single. Then perhaps you should not be in stocks at all or only to the the tune of 10% of net worth. But suppose you are married to a woman who is 65 and dependent on you for support. Since she might live another 30 years, you might be well advised to be 20-30% in stocks. Or you might have children to whom you want to leave a legacy.

3. Stocks are a long term investment. If you don't think and plan long term, stay away from them. Money that you will need within the next five years should never be put into the stock market, not even when it is in a bull phase. Everyone should have a cash reserve and that money should never be invested in the stock market. Park it in passbook accounts, certificates of deposit (CDs), and money market accounts. Bear in mind that money market accounts are not FDIC insured, and that the standard $1 share value is not guaranteed. But a Treasury money market fund will be very safe for obvious reasons.

4. Of course, no investing for the long term until you (a) have a cash reserve sufficient to get you through two years (not six months as the financial planners often recommend!) of unemployment, and (b) have eliminated all credit card and other non-mortgage debt. If you run credit card debt you will never get anywhere financially speaking. Use credit cards like I do: for the float, the substantial rebates, the record-keeping, and the convenience, but NEVER pay even one cent of interest. I never pay interest, I never pay for the use of the cards, but the CC companies pay me $300-400 per annum in rebates. Not a bad deal. Never buy what you can't afford to pay cash for right now. There is only one good exception to this rule and that is real estate, in particular the house you live in. Cars are not a good exception except perhaps when you are starting out.

To get anywhere financially you must consistently, month by month, year by year, live below your means. Not at your means, below them. Consistently. Very few people do this, but then most people make messes of their lives financially and otherwise.

5. Every form of saving and investing involves risk. You are being one-sided if you point to the risks of the stock market while ignoring the risks of other vehicles. Stuff greenbacks under your mattress and they might get stolen or consumed in a fire. Money in passbook accounts and CDs won't generate enough return to offset inflation. Banks and S & Ls have been known to fail. (And if enough fail at once, that much-vaunted FDIC and FSLIC insurance won't save your bacon!) No doubt it is the return of your money that is more important than the return on it, but if the return does not offset inflation, then, although the money returned to you may be nominally equal to or greater than the money invested, it will really be less: it will be less in terms of buying power, which is all that matters, since money is for spending. And of course the taxes you pay on passbook, money market and CD returns is also a factor to consider.

You think bonds are safe? A bond is a debt instrument. In essence, you loan money to some entity which promises to repay the money at a certain future date with a certain interest. If the entity goes out of business you lose. Since no vehicle of saving or investment is perfectly safe you must:

6. Diversify! Diversification will dilute your return over the long haul but it will reduce overall risk. You should consider diversifying across every economic parameter. Remember the Enron fools? They put their money into one stock, the stock of the company they worked for. So when Enron went down, they were doubly screwed: they lost their 401k accumulations and their income. Everyone knows that one must never put all one's eggs in one basket. So why did these people do something so abysmally stupid? They let their greed suborn their intellects. It was at bottom a moral failure. This is a recurrent theme of mine: the subornation of the intellect by the vices. That is the fundamental reason why we are in the mess we are in right now. There has been a wholesale collapse of morality and common sense both in the population at large and in the elites: the legislators, the academicians, and the business types.

Stock diversification is easily achieved by investing in mutual funds. Choose no-load (no front end or back end sales charge) mutual funds that also feature a low expense ratio. Since the actively managed funds will cost you more and may not deliver more, consider investing in index funds. There are even balanced index funds that provide instant diversification across the entire U.S. stock and bond markets.

7. The stock market is now in free fall, and no one knows where the bottom is. Many will panic, cash out, and lock in their losses. I plan to stay the course. That is, I plan to stay invested and continue buying at the rate I decided was appropriate. I plan to follow the course that I arrived at after due deliberation, and not second-guess myself or let the emotions of the moment throw me off a course judged right in calmer moments. And above all, I will not allow myself to be unduly influenced by what other people are doing or saying. Tune out the noise, trust your judgment (assuming it has proven to be sound in the past), and stay the course.

What are my reasons for staying the course? First, my asset allocation is very conservative and reasonable, fits my psychology (I have no trouble sleeping at night), and my time-horizon allows for recovery. Second, this is an outstanding buying opportunity. Everyone knows that you are supposed to buy low and sell high. But this maxim is very hard to implement because of greed, fear, and conformism. So people almost always do the opposite: they buy high in bullish markets and sell low when the bears come out. They follow the crowd, becoming irrationally exuberant when the markets are rising (no matter what the market, stocks, real estate, precious metals) and irrationally depressed when the markets are in decline. By staying the course and continuing to invest, I buy low.

"But why not cash out, wait for the bottom, and then get back in? That way, you get the benefits of buying low but without losing the value of what you have already accumulated. Why ride it down to the bottom?"

This reasoning is superficially plausible but it presupposes something that is false, namely, that one can know when the bottom has been reached. One cannot predict where the market is going or how it will move. The market cannot be timed or predicted. And it can turn around very quickly. If the DOW can drop 700 points in a day it can also gain 700 points in a day, and you cannot make money in a market unless you are in the market. You must be in the market on the days when it moves up. If you miss those days you will lose out. This from Barron's:

Consider that $1 invested in stocks from February 1966 through May 2007 would have grown to $16.58 in that period. That's a 7% annual return. By contrast, investors who were out of the market in the five best days each year during that span were left with only 11 cents. That's a pretty good case for the buy and hold philosophy, or, if you're out of the market, for getting back in soon.

A third reason for staying the course is that if I bail now, I lock in losses. But holding as I am for the long term, my losses are paper losses as opposed to real losses.

"But a paper loss is a real loss because your net worth is less than what it was before the decline."

This objection ignores the fact that stocks are a long term investment. Since the wise investor never puts money that will be needed in the near term into a long term investment (whether stocks or real estate), he is not fixated upon his actual net worth at any given time. Such an investor accepts fluctuations in net worth as long as there is a reasonable expectation of long term gain. (And if the asset allocation is very conservative, the fluctuation may affect only the rate of growth of a steadily growing net worth.) So, although it is true that the value of one's stock holdings if liquidated during a sharp decline or 'crash' as we are now experiencing will be much less than if liquidated before the decline, this does not bother the long term investor since he has no need and no intention of liquidating his shares. This, I take it, is what is meant by 'It's only a paper loss.'

You can live in a house but not in a stock mutual fund. That being understood, there is an analogy worth drawing. It doesn't matter whether the market value of my house increases or decreases in the near term since I like where I live and I have no intention of selling.

The crucial point, again, is that stocks are a long term investment. If you don't think long term, or if you think the long run won't be your run, or if you think we are on the eve of economic destruction, then stay away from the stock market.

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all
ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it
would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.

The fifth would pay $1.

The sixth would pay $3.

The seventh would pay $7.

The eighth would pay $12.

The ninth would pay $18.

The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that's what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the
arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. 'Since you
are all such good customers,' he said, 'I'm going to reduce the cost of
your daily beer by $20.' Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so
the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free.

But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they
divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share?'

They realized that $20 divided by six! is $3. 33. But if they
subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the
sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer.

So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to re
duce each man's
bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the
amounts each should pay.

And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).

The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).

The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).

The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).

The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).

The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four
continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men
began to compare their savings.

'I only got a dollar out of the $20,'declared the sixth man. He pointed
to the tenth man,' but he got $10!'

'Yeah, that's right,' exclaimed the fifth man. 'I only saved a dollar,
too. It's unfair that he got ten times more than I got' 'That's true!!'
shouted the seventh man. 'Why should he get $10 back when I got only
two? The wealthy get all the breaks!'

'Wait a minute,' yelled the first four men in unison. 'We didn't get
anything at all. The system exploits the poor!'

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks so the nine sat
down and had beers without him. But when it came time to
pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, journalists and college professors, is
how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the
most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for
being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they
might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat
friendlier.

It is plausible to maintain that EPP is a conceptual truth immune to counterexample. For any putative counterexample will be less credible than the principle of which it is the counterexample. In this respect EPP is like the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC): any putative counterexample will be less credible than LNC, pace Graham Priest, et al.

But let's quickly review a putative counterexample to EPP that came up in an earlier thread, thanks to some suggestive remarks of David Brightly. Tom is an irascible fellow: he is disposed to become angry on slight provocation. Now although a disposition can exist without ever being manifested, some dispositions are such that their manifestation is repeatable. This implies that if Tom on one occasion manifests his irascibility, this manifestation does not rule out later manifestations of the same disposition. Call such dispositions repeatable dispositions. Other dispositions are not repeatable. A sugar cube's disposition to dissolve if placed in water is unrepeatable: that very sugar cube's water-solubility, if manifested, rules out its ever being manifested again. And this for the obvious reason that the manifestation of the disposition in this case destroys the thing whose disposition it is. (If you say that the sugar cube can be reconstituted, I will agree that that is in principle possible, but deny that the reconstituted cube is numerically identical to the original cube.)

So we have repeatable and unrepeatable dispositions. We could also call then 'standing' dispositions and 'one-shot' dispositions. Now if some potentialities are repeatable dispositions, then we may have a counterexample to EPP. For then EPP implies that

1. Necessarily, if Tom is a potential angry person at t, then Tom is not an actual angry person at t.

But (1) is false: Since Tom is potentially angry at every time at which he exists, and since it is possible that he become angry at some time, it is possible that there is at least one time t such that Tom is both potentially angry at t and actually angry at t. But then it is not necessarily the case that being a potential F at t excludes being an actual F at t.

Now the simplest way to defuse this putative counterexample is to deny that some potentialities are repeatable dispositions. One can say that potentialities, if they are to be classified as dispositions at all, are to be classified as unrepeatable dispositions. This comports well with the standard examples, which are cases of development: the acorn develops into an oak tree, etc. In these cases, 'potency is reduced to act' as Aristotle might have said. These are not cases of 'standing' dispositions.

So EPP is epistemically in the clear. But Peter thinks it can be extended in a manner to cause trouble for PP. Here is my pithy formulation of the Extended Exclusionary Potentiality Principle:

EEPP. Necessarily, if x is a potential F at t, then x does not possess at t any of the properties in virtue of which an actual F is actual.

To supply a time-worn example, if an acorn is potentially an oak tree at t, then this fact rules out not merely that the acorn is not actually an oak tree at t; it also rules out that the acorn possesses at t the essential property of being deciduous, and all other properties without which oak trees cannot be actual.

A second example. If this human fetus is a potential speaker of English at t, then this human fetus does not possess at t the property of being able to make the sounds one must be able to make in order to speak English.

Suppose we grant EEPP. (Peter will have to tell me whether my formulation captures what he has in mind.) Does EEPP pose a threat to PP? Note that PP is a normative principle: it ascribes a normative property, the property of having a right to life, to potential descriptive persons. But EEPP is a non-normative principle: it says nothing about rights, duties, obligations or such-like. EEPP, with 'this fetus' substituted for 'x' and 'descriptive person' substituted for 'F' yields

2. Necessarily, if this fetus is a potential descriptive person at t, then this fetus does not possess at t any of the properties in virtue of which an actual descriptive person is actual.

I find (2) unexceptionable. But I also find (2) to be consistent with PP and PP*. This is because the normative property of having a right to life is not one of the constitutive properties of descriptive persons.

So I think Peter needs to explain why exactly he thinks that EEPP poses a threat to PP. I don't see that it does. Please bear in mind something I have said many times before: the potentialist, the proponent of PP, grounds the right to life in the very potentiality of the fetus to develop into something that actually possesses the properties that confer rights. What relevance, then, does EEPP have to PP?

This is more evidence of the delusional drift of the Leftist mind. Sarcasm? It appears to be foreign to Palin's nature. She is too perky and upbeat, too much the slightly naive eager beaver. I won't hold it against the tired sophisticates of the Left that they are put off by her wide-eyed girlish enthusiasm. But 'sarcasm' is a thoroughly inapt descriptor.

If you are from the provinces, does that make you a smug provincialist?

Her "hypocrisy about family and government?" That is on a level with Wendy Doniger's bizarre and by now infamous remark that "Her [Palin's] greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman." That is quite a thought. Palin pretends to be a woman, and in so pretending she is a hypocrite! Just as leftists cannot stand conservative blacks, who they tar with such epithets as 'Uncle Tom' and 'oreo,' they cannot stand powerful, successful conservative women who have achieved what equity feminists demanded. Doniger is implying that Palin is a traitor to her sex and thus not 'really' a woman. Thus her "pretense that she is a woman." Since Palin is quite obviously female, with living proof of the fact, Doniger's suggestion is that Palin is a traitor to her sex in the way that 'oreos' and 'Uncle Toms' are traitors to their race.

It would require a separate post to explain the leftist obsession with what they perceive as 'hypocrisy' in conservatives.

"Exploitation of mommyhood?" The Dems are sometimes polemically referred to as the 'the abortion party' or the 'party of death.' There is undoubtedly an element of truth in these labels. Sarah Palin, by contrast, quite obviously celebrates human life, even to the point of carrying to term a Downs Syndrome child. And this is what leftists, ever teetering on the brink of nihilism, cannot stand. How dare she celebrate human life! Raging as they do, leftists must read her obviously sincere stance as a cynical exploitation of "mommyhood" -- who is being sarcastic now? -- for the sake of political gain. Here is a good article on Palin Derangement Syndrome.

To revert to the hackneyed example, if an acorn is a potential oak tree, then every normal acorn is a potential oak tree, and this is so as a matter of natural necessity. It cannot be the case that some normal acorns have, while others do not have, the potentiality to become oak trees. Potentialities are inherent in the things that have them. They are not a matter of ascription. We don't ascribe potentialities; things have them regardless of our mental and linguistic performances. And these very performances themselves realize potentialities. So if the potentialities of the ascribing mind were themselves ascribed, who or what would do the ascribing? I cannot ascribe potentialities to myself if the ascribing is itself the realization of my potentiality to ascribe.

An ascriptivist theory of potentiality would be as absurd as Dennett's ascriptivist theory of intentionality, part of the refutation of which is here.

Similarly with dispositions. To say of a sugar cube that it is water-soluble is to say that, were it placed in water, it would dissolve. Now if this is true of one normal sugar cube, it is true of all normal sugar cubes. Suppose you have 100 sugar cubes, all alike. There would be no reason to say that some of them are water-soluble and some are not. If one is, all are. If one is not, none are. Thus what we might call the Dispositionality Universality Principle:

DUP: Necessarily, if a normal F is disposed to X, then every normal F is disposed to X.

Now we turn from the realm of nature to that of convention.

As a presidential candidate, John McCain has a right to certain federal funds. But when he was languishing in the 'Hanoi Hilton' he did not have the right to those funds. Now someone might get it into his head to say that McCain in Hanoi was a potential presidential candidate, and then argue like this:

Since McCain in Hanoi did not have the right to federal funds, and since McCain in Hanoi was a potential presidential candidate, it follows that a thing's being a potential possessor of qualifications for a certain moral or legal status S does not entail its being an actual possessor of qualifications for status S.

This is essentially Joel Feinberg's "logical point about potentiality." It is doubly flawed. One of the flaws I discussed earlier. Now I focus on the other flaw, namely, the violation of PUP above. If an F has the potentiality to become a G, then every normal F has the potentiality to become a G. Now in the McCain case, no matter what you plug in for 'F,' it will not be the case that every normal F has the potential to become a presidential candidate. It is simply false to say that McCain in Hanoi was a potential presidential canduidate in the relevant sense of 'potential.'

Let 'F' stand for U. S. citizen. Does every U.S. citizen have the potential to become a presidential candidate? Obviously not: it is is simply false that every normal U. S. citizen develops in the normal course of events into a presidential candidate. A potentiality is a naturally inherent nisus -- and as natural not a matter of laws or other conventions -- which is the same in all members of the class in question. But the opportunity to run for president has nothing natural about it: it is an artifact of our contingent laws and political arrangements. People like McCain do not become presidential contenders in the way acorns become oak trees. The Feinberg objection confuses nature and convention.

So I arrive once again and by a different route at the old conclusion: Feinberg's logical point is sired by a total misunderstanding of the notion of potentiality in play in the Potentiality Argument.

I've been the object of Schadenfreude, of glacial indifference, of jealousy. I've been fought over and thought not worth fighting over. I've been the object of every emotional attitude by someone or other, at some time or other, for some reason or other, or for no reason at all. I've been loved and then hated by the same person, and the other way around. I've been liked by people who do not love me, and loved by people who do not like me. I attract and I repel, sometimes different people, sometimes the same people at different times. I attract and repel myself, at different times, and pace the Law of Non-Contradiction, sometimes at the same time. I am different people to different people and different people to myself. And the same most likely goes for you.

There is no need to protract the litany — but what distillate of wisdom is to be squeezed from these grapes?

a) The human heart is fickle, and there is no call to care too much about what anyone thinks of one, whether good or bad — even oneself. I preach not apathy, but mesopathy, if I may coin a word, emotional response measured and middle-sized and thus appropriate to the images on the wall of the Cave.

b) Human reality is an ever-shifting play of perspectives and evaluations and, insofar forth, bare of ultimate reality and so not to be taken with utmost seriousness. All wisdom traditions teach the need of detachment or non-attachment. You are grasping at straws and chasing after shadows if you seek your ultimate reality in the broken mirrors of others' subjectivity. And your mirror is broken too.

c) If you have been done wrong, think of the times you have done others wrong. If on occasion you have not gotten what you deserve, recall the times when you got more than you deserved — and perhaps at the expense of the more deserving. If you judge that you have been unfairly treated, bear in mind that it is just someone's judgment that you have been unfairly treated, and that the mere fact that this someone is you is not all that significant.

The difference is explainable in terms of the difference between identity and constitution. A lump of raw meat cannot come to be a hamburger; at most it can come to constitute one. The same goes for the hunk of bronze: it cannot come to be a statue; at most it can come to constitute one. Note also that an external agent is required to shape and cook the meat and to hammer the bronze. An acorn and an embryo, on the other hand, can come to be an oak tree and a person, respectively, and indeed by their own internal agency. Potentiality in the strong sense here in play is therefore governed by the following Potentiality Identity Principle:

PIP: Necessarily, if x is a potential F, and there is a y such that y realizes, whether partially or fully, x's potentiality to be an F, then x = y.

Note that PIP does not imply that there is a y that realizes x's potential. Potentialities, after all, may go unrealized similarly as dispositions may go unmanifested. A seed's potential will go unrealized if the seed is destroyed, or if the seed is not planted, or if it is improperly planted, or if it is properly planted but left unwatered, etc. What PIP states is that if anything does realize x's potentiality to be an F, then that thing is transtemporally numerically identical to x. So if there is an oak tree that realizes acorn A's potentiality to be an oak tree, then A is identical over time to that oak tree. This implies that when the acorn becomes an oak tree, it still exists, but is an oak tree rather than an acorn. The idea is that numerically one and the same individual passes through a series of developmental stages. In the case of a human being these would include zygote, embryo, fetus, infant, child, adolescent, and adult.

Not so with the hunk of bronze. It is not identical to the statue that is made out of it. Statue and hunk of bronze cannot be identical since they differ in their persistence conditions. The hunk of bronze can, while the statue cannot, survive being melted down and recast in some other form.

Consider the Pauline verse at 1 Corinthians 13:11: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." This implies that numerically one and the same man, Paul of Tarsus, was first a child and later became an adult: it is not as if there was a numerically different entity, Paul-the-child, who passed out of existence when Paul-the-adult came into existence.

So not only is potentiality (in the strong sense here in play) governed by PIP, it is also governed by what I will call the Potentiality Endurantism Principle:

PEP. Necessarily, if x is a potential F, and there is a y such that y realizes, whether partially or fully, x's potentiality to be an F, then x (= y) is wholly present at every time at which x (= y) exists.

PEP rules out a temporal parts ontology according to which a spatiotemporal particular persists in virtue of having different temporal parts at different times.

Let me conclude by throwing another principle into the mix, one that is implict above. I'll call it the Potentiality Agency Principle:

PAP. Necessarily, if x is a potential F, and x's potential is to any extent realized, then the realization of x's potential is driven, not by any agency external to x, but by x's own internal agency, with the proviso that the circumambient conditions are favorable.

The notion of (strong) potentiality that figures in the Potentiality Principle and the Potentiality Argument is governed by PIP, PEP, and PAP at the very least.

Unscrew the very hinges from the eyesockets!
For death is near
in the exhalation of breath
in the space between heartbeats
in the narcolepsy of memory
in the errant synaptic fingerflash.

Go down into that good night
that transparent face a window blank and wide
cave into it with a will under ego's weight.

Embrace that night, rage against false light
the lethic light of maya distraction.

Plunge in now I first
tongue that glass to shatter outward
into the abysmal matrix.

Wear that clear death, so becoming
and never going out of style.

Death is many-receptive, the polyunsaturated gappiness
that holds things together
the unsated Interstitial ueberhaupt
the wound that bleeds us back into life
the sheath that makes a stiff-stander out of every man jack of us
the cylinder of every piston push of philosophy
the ruby-lipped mother-mouth
the meretriciously moist Overmouth.

I recollect you in song at October's end.

30 October/6 November 1984

Lupu also enunciates a proposition he calls the Extended Exclusionary Principle of Potentiality:

EEPP. If an entity is potentially such-and-such at t, then this fact rules out not merely that it is actually such-and-such at t; it also rules out that the entity in question possesses at t any of the properties in virtue of which something is a such-and-such.

To supply my own example, if an acorn is potentially an oak tree at t, then this fact rules out not merely that the acorn is not actually an oak tree at t; it also rules out that the acorn possesses at t the essential property of being deciduous, and all other properties without which oak trees cannot exist.

Lupu wants to use EEPP to refute PP:

PP. All potential persons have the right to life.

Suppose the human fetus is a potential person, and suppose that having a right to life is an essential property of every person. If EEPP is true, then the fetus' being a potential person at t rules out the fetus' possession of the property of having a right to life at t. If so, however, PP is false.

What Lupu is arguing, then, is that EEPP and PP are logically inconsistent: they cannot both be true. But EEPP does seem to be true, whence it follows that PP is false. In an attempt to meet this objection, I wheel a further principle onto the field of battle, a proposition that I will call the Potentiality Identity Principle:

PIP: To say of x that it is a potential F is to imply that x is transtemporally numerically identical to any actual F that realizes x's potential to become an F.

For example, to say of an acorn that it is a potential oak tree is to imply that the acorn is numerically identical over time to an actual oak true, if there is one, that realizes the acorn's potential to become an oak tree. From what he says here, it appears that Lupu accepts PIP. Now suppose a particular acorn does in fact become an oak tree, thereby realizing its potential. By PIP, the acorn is numerically identical to the oak tree. Now an essential property of x is a property x has at every time at which x exists. So if deciduousness is an essential property of oak tree O, and O is identical to acorn A, then deciduousness is a property of A. Similarly, if being a rights-possessor is an essential property of a person, and that person is identical to a fetus, then being a rights-possessor is a property of the fetus.

Admittedly this sounds counterintuitive. How could an acorn be deciduous? How could an acorn be such that it sheds its leaves in the fall? Acorns have no leaves! True, but if the individual that at time t is an acorn is identical to the individual that at a later time t* is an oak tree, and if essential properties are had by their possessors at every time at which the possessors exist, then how can the individual that at t is an acorn not be deciduous? If there is exactly one self-same individual, existent at different times, which is first potentially an oak tree and later actually an oak tree, and if deciduousness is an essential property of this self-same individual, then deciduousness is a property of this individual at every time at which it exists.

To remove the counterintuitiveness we might say this: The individual that is an acorn at time t is deciduous in that it sheds in the fall the leaves it has when it has leaves. Similarly, we might say that the individual that is an infant human has the capacity to reason in that it is identical to a mature human that has the capacity to reason. Finally, we might say that the individual that is a fetus has the right to life because it is identical to a person that has the right to life essentially.

In short, by invoking PIP it may be possible to reject EEPP while holding onto PP. But I admit that Lupu's objection to PP is a troublesome one.

This bailout was a terrible idea. Here's why.

The current mess would never have occurred in the absence of ill-conceived federal policies. The federal government chartered Fannie Mae in 1938 and Freddie Mac in 1970; these two mortgage lending institutions are at the center of the crisis. The government implicitly promised these institutions that it would make good on their debts, so Fannie and Freddie took on huge amounts of excessive risk.

Worse, beginning in 1977 and even more in the 1990s and the early part of this century, Congress pushed mortgage lenders and Fannie/Freddie to expand subprime lending. The industry was happy to oblige, given the implicit promise of federal backing, and subprime lending soared.

This subprime lending was more than a minor relaxation of existing credit guidelines. This lending was a wholesale abandonment of reasonable lending practices in which borrowers with poor credit characteristics got mortgages they were ill-equipped to handle.

Once housing prices declined and economic conditions worsened, defaults and delinquencies soared, leaving the industry holding large amounts of severely depreciated mortgage assets.

The fact that government bears such a huge responsibility for the current mess means any response should eliminate the conditions that created this situation in the first place, not attempt to fix bad government with more government.

The obvious alternative to a bailout is letting troubled financial institutions declare bankruptcy. Bankruptcy means that shareholders typically get wiped out and the creditors own the company.

Bankruptcy does not mean the company disappears; it is just owned by someone new (as has occurred with several airlines). Bankruptcy punishes those who took excessive risks while preserving those aspects of a businesses that remain profitable.

In contrast, a bailout transfers enormous wealth from taxpayers to those who knowingly engaged in risky subprime lending. Thus, the bailout encourages companies to take large, imprudent risks and count on getting bailed out by government. This "moral hazard" generates enormous distortions in an economy's allocation of its financial resources.

Thoughtful advocates of the bailout might concede this perspective, but they argue that a bailout is necessary to prevent economic collapse. According to this view, lenders are not making loans, even for worthy projects, because they cannot get capital. This view has a grain of truth; if the bailout does not occur, more bankruptcies are possible and credit conditions may worsen for a time.

Talk of Armageddon, however, is ridiculous scare-mongering. If financial institutions cannot make productive loans, a profit opportunity exists for someone else. This might not happen instantly, but it will happen.

Further, the current credit freeze is likely due to Wall Street's hope of a bailout; bankers will not sell their lousy assets for 20 cents on the dollar if the government might pay 30, 50, or 80 cents.

The costs of the bailout, moreover, are almost certainly being understated. The administration's claim is that many mortgage assets are merely illiquid, not truly worthless, implying taxpayers will recoup much of their $700 billion.

If these assets are worth something, however, private parties should want to buy them, and they would do so if the owners would accept fair market value. Far more likely is that current owners have brushed under the rug how little their assets are worth.

The bailout has more problems. The final legislation will probably include numerous side conditions and special dealings that reward Washington lobbyists and their clients.

Anticipation of the bailout will engender strategic behavior by Wall Street institutions as they shuffle their assets and position their balance sheets to maximize their take. The bailout will open the door to further federal meddling in financial markets.

So what should the government do? Eliminate those policies that generated the current mess. This means, at a general level, abandoning the goal of home ownership independent of ability to pay. This means, in particular, getting rid of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with policies like the Community Reinvestment Act that pressure banks into subprime lending.

The right view of the financial mess is that an enormous fraction of subprime lending should never have occurred in the first place. Someone has to pay for that. That someone should not be, and does not need to be, the U.S. taxpayer.

. . . mortgage lenders didn't wake up one fine day deciding to junk long-held standards of creditworthiness in order to make ill-advised loans to unqualified borrowers. It would be closer to the truth to say they woke up to find the government twisting their arms and demanding that they do so - or else.

The roots of this crisis go back to the Carter administration. That was when government officials, egged on by left-wing activists, began accusing mortgage lenders of racism and "redlining" because urban blacks were being denied mortgages at a higher rate than suburban whites.

The pressure to make more loans to minorities (read: to borrowers with weak credit histories) became relentless. Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act, empowering regulators to punish banks that failed to "meet the credit needs" of "low-income, minority, and distressed neighborhoods." Lenders responded by loosening their underwriting standards and making increasingly shoddy loans. The two government-chartered mortgage finance firms, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, encouraged this "subprime" lending by authorizing ever more "flexible" criteria by which high-risk borrowers could be qualified for home loans, and then buying up the questionable mortgages that ensued.

All this was justified as a means of increasing homeownership among minorities and the poor. Affirmative-action policies trumped sound business practices. A manual issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston advised mortgage lenders to disregard financial common sense. "Lack of credit history should not be seen as a negative factor," the Fed's guidelines instructed. Lenders were directed to accept welfare payments and unemployment benefits as "valid income sources" to qualify for a mortgage. Failure to comply could mean a lawsuit.

As long as housing prices kept rising, the illusion that all this was good public policy could be sustained. But it didn't take a financial whiz to recognize that a day of reckoning would come. "What does it mean when Boston banks start making many more loans to minorities?" I asked in this space in 1995. "Most likely, that they are knowingly approving risky loans in order to get the feds and the activists off their backs . . . When the coming wave of foreclosures rolls through the inner city, which of today's self-congratulating bankers, politicians, and regulators plans to take the credit?"

[Congressman Barney] Frank doesn't. But his fingerprints are all over this fiasco. Time and time again, Frank insisted that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were in good shape. Five years ago, for example, when the Bush administration proposed much tighter regulation of the two companies, Frank was adamant that "these two entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not facing any kind of financial crisis." When the White House warned of "systemic risk for our financial system" unless the mortgage giants were curbed, Frank complained that the administration was more concerned about financial safety than about housing.

Now that the bubble has burst and the "systemic risk" is apparent to all, Frank blithely declares: "The private sector got us into this mess." Well, give the congressman points for gall. Wall Street and private lenders have plenty to answer for, but it was Washington and the political class that derailed this train. If Frank is looking for a culprit to blame, he can find one suspect in the nearest mirror.