Maverick Philosopher

Suppose I open a cheesecake emporium, and you decide to make cheesecake your main dietary item. Am I responsible for your ensuing health difficulties? Of course not. Being a nice guy, I will most likely warn you that a diet consisting chiefly of cheesecake is contraindicated. But in the end, the responsibility for your ill health lies with you.

The same goes for tobacco products, cheeseburgers, and so on down the line. The responsibility for your drunk driving resides with you, not with auto manufacturers or distilleries. Is this hard to understand? Not unless you are morally obtuse.

The principle extends to gun manufacturers and retailers. They have their legal responsibilities, of course. But once a weapon has been legally purchased or otherwise acquired, the owner alone is responsible for any crimes he commits using it. But many liberals don't see it this way. What they cannot achieve through gun control legislation, they hope to achieve through frivolous lawsuits.

Luckily, there are still people who can see through the contemptible moral idiocy of the Left. New York City v. Beretta has been decided in favor of Beretta and other gun manufacturers. Commentary here.

To explain what exactly a natural right is and to show that there are such rights are difficult tasks. Here I assume what strikes me as tolerably clear and intuitively evident, namely, that there are some natural rights.

If so, then whether we have a right to life, or any natural right, cannot depend on the interpretation of any document. Therefore, with respect to the question of gun rights, the interpretation of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, albeit important, is logically secondary. The logically prior question is whether there are natural gun rights that need constitutional codification, recognition, and protection.

Th notion that one has a natural right to own a gun may sound absurd, but if I can derive the right to own a gun from the natural right to life, then I will have gone some distance toward showing that the right to own a gun — or more generally, the right to procure for oneself the means of self-defense — is a natural right.

So here is my argument.

1. Every human person possesses a natural right to life.

2. If every human person has a right to life, then he has a right to defend his life against those who would seek to violate it.

3. If every human person has a right to defend his life, then he has a right to an effective means of defending his life.

Therefore

4. Every human person has a right to an effective means of defending his life. (From 1, 2, 3 by Modus Ponens and Hypothetical Syllogism.)

5. In many circumstances, a handgun is the only effective means of defending one's life.

Therefore

6. In many circumstances, human persons have a right to possess handguns, a right that is not conferred by constitutions but ought to be respected by them.

The conclusions (4) and (6) follow from the premises, though I might need to think more about the logic of the move from (4) and (5) to (6). (What exactly is the form of the argument and the validating rules of inference?) But are the premises defensible? I maintain that they are.

I take (1) to be axiomatic. In any case it is here assumed and cannot be here defended. Note that the argument does not assume that every human being is a human person. Charles Manson is a human being, but it is arguable that by the commission of his crimes he forfeited his personhood, and with it his right to life. Some will hold that human fetuses are not persons, and so have no right to life. I believe they are wrong, but the above argument does not rest on the assumption that they are.

To see that (2) is true, consider what happens if you negate it. The negation of (2) is: (~2) Human persons have a right to life, but they do not have the right to defend their lives. The absurdity of this is self-evident. How can I have a right to life if it is morally impermissible for me to defend my life? My having a right to life may not entail any moral obligation on my part to defend my life, but it surely entails the moral permissibility of self-defense. For if I have a right to life, then others have an obligation not to harm me. This obligation of theirs entitles me to meet a deadly threat with force sufficient to thwart the attack up to and including killing the assailant. We appear to be at moral rock-bottom here. I say (2) is self-evident. Reject it, and there is probably no point in further discussion.

I don't know exactly how to explain what a right is, but it is something like an entitlement (is this a case of obscurum per obscurius?) If I have a right to X, then I am entitled to X, and that entitlement grounds the moral permissibility of my defending my pursuit of or possession of X.

We now turn to (3): If a human person has a right to defend his life, then he has a right to an effective means of defending his life. The negation of (3) also strikes me as absurd: You have a right to defend yourself, but no right to the possession of any effective means of so doing. In rebuttal of this absurdity consider the following.

To will the end is to will the means. So, to will one's defense is to will the means to one's defense. Therefore, if it is morally permissible to will one's defense, then it is morally permissible to will the means to one's defense. To will the means to one's defense is to will the possession of, and the ability to use, sufficient means for one's defense. I grant that qualifications may be needed. Arguably, felons ought not have the right to purchase firearms. A felon either forfeits his right to self-defense, or has that right overridden by the community's right to be safe from his predation. The right to own a weapon for self-defense, even if derivable from the natural right to life, is like the right to life itself: in some circumstances it is forfeited.

But how could the natural right to life be forfeited? How could one lose such a right? Suppose that you, unprovoked, attack me with deadly force with the intent to kill me. I am justified in killing you if that is what it takes to stop your deadly attack. If I am so justified, then my killing you is morally permissible. Now if your right to life was not forfeited by you at the moment you attempted to kill me, then your right to life would generate in me the correlative duty to respect your life by refraining from any and all actions that might harm it. It would then be impermissible for me to kill you. Therefore, if one who possess a right to life cannot ever, by anything he does, forfeit the right to life, then my killing you is both permissible and impermissible. But that is a contradiction, whence it follows that there are circumstances in which a person forfeits his right to life.

So I don't see any problem with a person's possession of natural rights that can be forfeited by the person's free acts. There is also the case of capital punishment. 'Surely' capital punishiment is in some cases not only morally permissible, but morally obligatory: justice in some cases demands it. Well, if you agree with that, then you have to grant either that the natural right to life can be forfeited or else overridden.

(5) is obviously true pending some obvious qualifications that I left out for the sake of brevity, the soul of wit and of blog. A handgun is an effective means of self defense, but not in all circumstances, only if the defender is properly trained in the use of firearms, etc.

The conclusion follows from the premises, and the premises are defensible. So I say the individual qua individual (as opposed to the individual qua member of some collective such as a police force or military unit) has an individual right to possess firearms for the purpose of defending his own life. The existence of such an individual right does not entail that it is unlimited. Thus if I have a right to firepower sufficient to my self-defense, it does not follow that I have a right to firepower sufficent to lay waste to a city. One non sequitur to avoid is this: There is no unlimited individual right to keep and bear arms; ergo, the right to keep and bear arms is a collective right.

Arguments like the foregoing make appeal to people's reason. Like all my arguments, the above argument is directed to open-minded, reasonable people who are doing their level best to form correct opinions about matters of moment. You decide whether I have been employing right reason. But if you wish to criticize, just be sure that you engage what I have actually written and not something you have excogitated on the occasion of skimming my post.

I wonder: has anyone proposed a drinking license? Why not? How many people have been killed by drivers under the influence of nicotine as opposed to under the influence of alcohol?

To stymie the psychologizers, let me say that I do not smoke cigarettes. My enjoyment of the noble weed is restricted to the occasional cigar and load of pipe tobacco.

I propose a tax on liberals and their products. Each piece of Hollywood trash glamorizing gratuitous violence, sexual excess, and criminality should bear a hefty tax. Indeed each piece of degrading, thought-deadening rubbish emanating from the Left of whatever sort should be taxed. Libs and lefties themselves should be taxed for being what they are. Surely this would redound to society's benefit. It would give them an incentive to improve their thought and behavior. I will withdraw my proposals when the boneheads of the Left come to their senses about tobacco.

There is something I call misplaced moral enthusiasm. Anti-tobacco extremism is a good example. Dennis Prager talks sense on this issue. Excerpt:

But it is surely an illustration of the moral confusion of our times that while scenes of gratuitous violence and sex, whose only purpose is to titillate the viewer, not to mention scenes of alcohol drinking, arouse no controversy, one scene is seething with controversy: Pierce Brosnan as James Bond smokes a cigar!

He did what?

Using evidence from literature and pharmacology and drawing on examples from his own clinical experience, Dalrymple shows that addiction is not a disease, but a response to personal and existential problems. He argues that withdrawal from opiates is not a serious medical condition but a relatively trivial experience, and says that criminality causes addiction far more often than addiction causes criminality.

I didn't think much of his take on Kerouac — see Dalrymple's Kerouac Caricature and Dalrymple Doesn't Know Jack — but other than that Dalrymple talks sense in spades. Take a gander at his What is Poverty? and this recent miniature contra Habermas.

But at this stage of the game it is perhaps best just to give liberals the phrase 'socially-conscious investing' to use in their biased way and reserve for ourselves the phrase 'liberty-conscious investing.' This is a large topic, and at the moment I offer only a few preliminary remarks provoked by this statement from Calvert Funds:

Companies in our portfolios must produce safe products and services in accordance with federal consumer product safety guidelines. Due to concerns about the impact of certain products on society, we do not invest in major manufacturers of tobacco products, alcoholic beverages, weapons, or firearms. We also exclude companies that operate gambling establishments.

Since I am a conservative, and not a libertarian, I have no objection to a certain amount of government regulation of the marketplace. Product safety is important and one cannot expect corporations whose stated aim is to benefit shareholders to maintain the highest standards with respect to product safety. But let's not forget that any product can become unsafe in the hands of an idiot, and that idiocy cannot be legislated or regulated out of existence.

Turning to alcohol and tobacco, why is is socially irresponsible to invest in companies that manufacture such products? Alcoholic beverages are a delightful adjunct to a civilized life. They relax, give pleasure, and lubricate the gears of social intercourse. They are not necessary to a civilized life, but a civilized life is precisely one that is not restricted to necessities. It is true that many abuse alcohol, but even more use it, and the ones who abuse it do so freely. And the same goes for tobacco. One can use it without abusing it or abusing oneself in using it. What better capstone to an excellent meal than a fine cigar? Or a celebration of the marriage by fire of burley and briar? Or even a good cigarette? I should point out to the uninitiated that the cigar- and pipe-smoker does not inhale, and that the depth of inhalation of the cigarette smoker is up to his own free choice. And the number and type of cigarettes smoked is also up to his free choice.

Now consider firearms. How could it be socially irresponsible to invest in companies that manufacture them when it is clear that firearms can be used for morally good ends? In the hands of the police and the military firearms are often used for morally good purposes. And the same goes for firearms in the hands of civilians. Guns can be used to kill, but also to prevent killing, and to limit killing. Many are the occasions on which the mere 'showing of steel' suffices to ward off a deadly attack. I don't have to shoot you to persuade you that there is no percentage in doing me violence. It doesn't take an Einstein to realize that guns can be used for morally evil purposes, morally good purposes and such morally indifferent purposes as plinking at inanimate targets.

One question I would put to liberals who oppose the manufacture of firearms is this. Would you agree to live in a place where police and military and civilian protection of the sort that requires firearms is nonexistent?

There is another important question that needs to be asked. If it is immoral to invest in companies that manufacture alcohol, tobacco, and firearms, then it should be even more immoral to invest in media conglomerates that market such evil and soul-destroying rubbish as (some) rap music. Think of all the socially deleterious junk that comes out of Hollywood. How can it be socially irresponsible to invest in a gun manufacturer, but not socially irresponsible to invest in a cultural polluter?

And if our liberal pals defend cultural pollution in the name of 'freedom of expression,' why do they not defend drinking and gambling and smoking and gun-owning in the name of 'freedom of action'?

The all-encompassing nature of the Randian line may be illustrated by an incident that occurred to a friend of mine who once asked a leading Randian if he disagreed with the movement’s position on any conceivable subject. After several minutes of hard thought, the Randian replied: "Well, I can’t quite understand their position on smoking." Astonished that the Rand cult had any position on smoking, my friend pressed on: "They have a position on smoking? What is it?" The Randian replied that smoking, according to the cult, was a moral obligation. In my own experience, a top Randian once asked me rather sharply, "How is it that you don’t smoke?" When I replied that I had discovered early that I was allergic to smoke, the Randian was mollified: "Oh, that’s OK, then."

The official justification for making smoking a moral obligation was a sentence in Atlas where the heroine refers to a lit cigarette as symbolizing a fire in the mind, the fire of creative ideas. (One would think that simply holding up a lit match could do just as readily for this symbolic function.) One suspects that the actual reason, as in so many other parts of Randian theory, from Rachmaninoff to Victor Hugo to tap dancing, was that Rand simply liked smoking and had the need to cast about for a philosophical system that would make her personal whims not only moral but also a moral obligation incumbent upon everyone who desires to be rational.

But I want to talk about cigarettes. Suppose you smoke one pack per day. Is that irrational? I hope all will agree that no one who is concerned to be optimally healthy as long as possible should smoke 20 cigarettes a day. But long-term health is only one value among many. Suppose one genuinely enjoys smoking and is willing to run the risk of disease and perhaps shorten one's life by say five years in order to secure certain benefits in the present. There is nothing irrational about such a course of action. One acts rationally -- in one sense of 'rational' -- if one chooses means conducive to the ends one has in view. If your end in view is to live as long as possible, then don't smoke. If that is not your end, if you are willing to trade some highly uncertain future years of life for some certain pleasures here and now, and if you enjoy smoking, then smoke.

The epithet 'irrational' is attached with more justice to the fascists of the Left, the loony-brained tobacco wackos, who, in the grip of their misplaced moral enthusiasm, demonize the acolytes of the noble weed. The church of liberalism must have its demon, and his name is tobacco. I should also point out that smoking, like keeping and bearing arms, is a liberty issue. Is liberty a value? I'd say it is. Yet another reason to oppose the loons of the Left. Scroll down here and read something by Christopher Hitchens on the topic. The Hitch is always good, even when he is wrong, as he is not on this issue.

A ballot measure in California calling for a 300% increase in the tobacco tax is the latest in a national trend to stamp out smoking by making it too costly. California's tax increase would go further than other states by creating the highest levy on cigarettes in the nation.

[. . .]

The California proposal, identified as Proposition 86 on the November ballot, would increase the tax on cigarettes to $3.47 a pack from the current 87 cents. Similar increases would apply to cigars and other tobacco products. That would send the average price of a pack of cigarettes from $4 to $6.55, says the California Department of Health Services.

See here for further details.

This proposal is multiply idiotic. My man O'Reilly is about to come on, so I have time for just one simple point: pass this law and you will create a black market for tobacco products if one does not already exist, with all the negative consequences that that will bring in its train.

More reasonable would be a tax on liberals.

. . . the legislation would end lawsuits against the gun industry by government entities, which argued that the irresponsible distribution of unsafe firearms was driving up violence in their communities.

Thirty-three cities, counties and states — including New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami-Dade County and New York state — have filed civil lawsuits against the industry.

But the bill would not provide a liability shield to those who knowingly sell firearms for committing a crime. And it would require the industry to provide child safety locks on handguns.

Now, how could any reasonable person oppose such legislation? Here we have a fundamental and irreconcilable difference between conservatives and liberals, and yet another reason why debate with them is a waste of time. Click here for some Scheer lunacy on the topic.

The legislation does not prevent standard product liability suits, nor does it prevent suits against distributors who sell firearms illegally. What it does is reinforce the commonsensical principle that the manufacturer of a product, or the seller of a product, cannot be held responsible for crimes committed by someone who uses the product.

Suppose I sell you my car, transferring title to you in a manner in accordance with all the relevant statutes. You then use the car to mow down children on a school yard. Can I be held morally responsible for your crime? Of course not. No doubt, had I not sold you that particular car, that particular event would not have occurred: as a philosopher would put it, the event is individuated by its constituents, one of them being the car I sold you. But that does not show I am responsible for your crime.

Now anyone who would disagree with me on this point I would consider an idiot not worth talking to. I sometimes use the term 'topical idiot.' One can be a topical idiot -- an idiot with respect to a particular topic -- without being a general idiot. But someone who cannot see that the gun case is strictly analogous is just as much of a topical idiot.

And so on across a range of cases. Suppose I open a cheesecake emporium, and you decide to make cheesecake your main dietary item. Am I responsible for your ensuing health difficulties? Of course not. Now being a nice guy, I will most likely warn you that a diet consisting chiefly of cheesecake is contraindicated. But in the end, the responsibility for your ill health lies with you.

The same goes for tobacco products, cheeseburgers, and so on down the line. Can't follow this reasoning? Then you are a multiply topical idiot.

As the lunch neared its end, the Greek woman lit a cigarette. Unfortunately, a politically correct young Brit was sitting directly to her right. He asked her to put out the cigarette, but she refused. So he doused her and her cigarette with a glass of water. As one might have expected, the Greek woman became quite animated at this turn of events, and an altercation ensued. After things subsided a bit, I looked into her eyes and said one word: ataraxia. She looked back and shouted: ATARAXIA!

I extract three morals from this true story.

The first is that the activities of professional philosophers are at best only loosely connected to the acquisition of wisdom. One can read a thousand books in three languages, publish a hundred articles in two, become ever so skilled in logic and dialectic — and at the end of the day be scarcely distinguishable, morally speaking, from the average schlep. This is not so much an argument against professional philosophy as it is an argument against human nature. Religion, too, seems to lead to little improvement in its practitioners.

The second moral is the arrogance of the British. This charge is not an inference from this particular case – which would be a hasty generalization – but an illustration of a point antecedently known.(People often confuse hasty generalization with illustration or exemplification: if I give an example of a general truth, that is not to say that I have arrived at the truth by generalization from that example.)

Consider the situation. The Brit was a guest in a foreign country, a country whose ways diverge markedly from those of Mother England. There are different attitudes toward work, play, relaxation, food, entertainment – and smoking. Greeks, like Turks, are fond of the noble weed. They savor, they enjoy, they take their time: I once watched a Turk smoke a cigarette as if he were making love to it. We were sitting in the open air. Oblivious to all this, the arrogant Brit sought to impose his will on one of his hosts. The Brits are right up there with the French. Their arrogance seems to vary inversely with their worldly power and stature.

The third moral has to do with the tobacco wacko phenomenon in general. I subsume it under the rubric, misplaced moral enthusiasm. This is a big topic, one to which I shall no doubt return, time and again. At the moment, I will just say that tobacco wackism is a form of social insanity right up there with the anorexia-inducing conceit that one cannot be too skinny. The idiot Brit was willing to destroy a perfect social occasion because of an ideologically grounded hostility to a bit of sidestream smoke that he could easily have moved away from.

There was a law in Mesa, Arizona a while ago – it may have been since repealed – that forbade smoking in all commercial establishments including bars and tobacco shops. That’s just crazy. People go to bars to pollute their bodies with alcohol and their souls with idle talk. That is their right. Surely these forms of pollution are worse than nicotine pollution.

BV: Thanks for writing, Dennis. I have been thinking about you in connection with your beloved Pollo alla Marsala. Later, I am going to explain how you can prepare it for yourself so as to end some of the suffering induced by the culinary backwater in which you presently reside. But I digress.

The underlying facts you mention are not in dispute. But I am not sure I understand your argument. If S1 pushes S2 off a building, but S2 survives, then S1 has not caused the death of S2. What you must mean is that if S1 pushes and S2 dies, then S1 caused the death of S2 regardless of the fact that in similar circumstances not every 'pushee' dies. Now I don't deny that there is causation here at the level of event-tokens. But I should think that this causation at the token level is a species of necessitation.

So let's consider the question at the type level. Then your claim is that the event-type pushing causes the event-type dying (subject to all relevant caveats and provisos) even if a tokening of the first event-type merely raises the probability (to a degree <1) of a tokening of the second event-type.

Now what you are saying makes sense and is in accord with the usage of many philosophers nowadays. But for me, causation is a species of necessitation, and the 'action' occurs at the level of tokens, not types. I think you will agree that types as such don't do any causing. It is only the tokening of a type that can serve as a relatum of a causal relation. Now either token t₁ necessitates token t₂ or it does not. It seems to me to make no sense to say that one event-token raises the probability of the occurrence of a second event-token.

But to pursue this further, I would have to hear what your theory of causation is. As you know, there are several theories on offer. To lay one of my cards on the table: I reject regularity theories.

There is also the point that the type smoking and the type lung cancer (or else the disjunctive type: lung cancer or emphysema or . . .) are rather unlike the types mentioned in your two examples. Almost no one survives a ten story fall. (Are you aware of even one documentable case?) But plenty of people smoke all their lives without getting lung cancer. In my family alone, there are perhaps a half dozen examples. One uncle smoked unfiltered Camels.

2. As you might have guessed from my earlier email about liberals and conservatives, I’m not overly happy about the paragraph starting with “[l]iberals and leftists engage in this loose talk for at least two reasons.” Can’t liberals believe as they do because it seems to them, on reflection, the right thing to do, whether or not they can perform a power grab in the process? And the claim that their “loose talk” “aids them in their denial of individual responsibility” seems to me to rest on an implicit false dilemma: surely a liberal can believe in individual responsibility and believe that there are various social structures that are harmful and ought to be censured or restricted in various ways.

BV: That's a good objection, Dennis, and I take it seriously. Let me first say that I write several different kinds of posts. Some are pure philosophy posts. These purport to be rein wissenschaftlich. Others are of a political and social nature, and in them I allow myself to engage in a bit of polemic (from the Gr. polemos, war, strife.) It is a tough question whether there can or even should be pure, polemic-free political philosophy. I am currently thinking about this in connection with study of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, but I have just begun to seriously engage this issue and have no fixed view. In any case, I believe (rightly or wrongly) that the Left must be defeated. If I am right, then some amount of polemic may be not only permissible, but also obligatory.

Did I qualify 'liberals and leftists' with 'many'? I'll have to look. Certainly many libs and lefties are motivated by a desire for power and will say anything to grab it and hold it.

You and I will agree that a theory or policy cannot be refuted by tracing it back to the psychological motivations of its proponents. Theories and policies must be evaluated on their own merits. But once I have refuted a view, then I consider myself justified in explaining how someone could hold such a (false, incoherent, unsupported . . .) view. Why, for example, do MANY Dems oppose SS reform? Their arguments are bad and they have no proposals of their own. (Barbara Boxer would be a good example.) It seems clear to me that they oppose Bush type reforms because they want to retain their power over people, the power that comes from controlling how much money people receive in retirement benefits. If someone maintains a position that obviously benefits him in terms of money, power, status, yet has either no arguments for the position, or demonstrably worthless ones, then it is entirely legitimate to 'psychologize' such a person.

But the psychologizing must come after their arguments have been refuted, not before.

Regarding the false dilemma, you want to say that a liberal can uphold individual responsibility while also holding that certain "social structures" ought to be "censured or restricted." Well, any sane person will agree with that. For example, adults ought to be free to purchase and consume alcoholic beverages, but no one wants them to be made available to children. But you may not be appreciating my point: the liberal tendency is to deny individual responsibility and to displace it onto factors external to the agent. That's not to say that everyone who calls himself a liberal does this. Alan Colmes calls himself a liberal but I'm sure he would come out in favor of individual responsibility. We are talking types and tendencies here. We have gone entirely too far in the liberal direction, as it seems to me, and now for the good of the country we need to make a correction and move back in the conservative direction. I wouldn't be calling myself a conservative if it were not for the extremism of contemporary liberals, an extremism from which I wish to dissociate myself. In some ways, I myself am a classical liberal.

Thanks again for your civil comments, and feel free to counterrespond.