In a Blog’s Stead
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Katharine Hepburn, R.I.P.

Katharine Hepburn died today at the age of 96.

One of the most delightful screen actresses of all time, the irrepressible, irreplaceable Hepburn embodied strength, fire, intelligence, independence, and eccentric individuality. What other actress could achieve such a seamless blend of femininity and androgyny, of wackiness and dignity, of toughness and fragility, of down-to-earth simplicity and aristocratic hauteur?

I’m sorry she’s gone, because it now seems terribly unlikely that I’ll ever marry her.

Incredibly, many of her movies are not currently available. But those who want to see her at her best could do worse than to sample
The Philadelphia Story, Bringing Up Baby, and The Lion in Winter.

Farewell, Kate.


P. S. – Oh yeah, some Senator died too.


Posted June 29th, 2003

Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog06-03.htm#07

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Long’s Review of De Jasay Now Online

My review of Anthony de Jasay’s book Justice and Its Surroundings for the Independent Review is now online: click here.


Posted June 29th, 2003

Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog06-03.htm#06

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The Constitution of Liberty

I’m delighted by the Supreme Court’s decision today in Lawrence v. Texas, striking down state laws regulating private sexual conduct (and thereby overturning the Court’s infamous 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick). I’m not impressed by most of the actual reasoning in the decision (see the
majority opinion and O’Connor’s concurring opinion), but I applaud the result.

Conservatives (including Justice Scalia in his dissenting opinion) are screaming their heads off, warning us that this decision, striking down Texas anti-sodomy statutes, paves the way to the legalisation of gay marriage, polygamy, prostitution, and other private and consensual sexual relationships. Good, I hope so.

Justice Thomas, in his rather less hysterical dissent, expressed sympathy for the plaintiffs’ cause but objected that there is no right to privacy in the Constitution. This raises the old question of how one should go about interpreting that document. It’s often supposed that what a statement means is determined by its speaker’s intentions. This is true, but only in a way. Suppose I say “Hitler may have won World War II,” mistakenly believing (as many do) that this means the same thing as “Hitler might have won World War II.” My having intended something true doesn’t change the fact that, given the established rules of grammar, what I have actually said is false. But then I really have a double intention here. On the one hand, I intend to convey a certain idea: the idea that Hitler might have won World War II. On the other hand, I intend to speak grammatical English and not some private idiolect of my own. The latter intention commits me to deferring to grammatical rules of which I am ignorant, a semantic intention that ends up trumping my direct intention.

The same point applies to constitutional interpretation. As legal philosopher David Lyons writes:

Imagine that you and I disagree about the substantive requirements of social justice. We then differ as to how the concept of justice applies; we differ, that is, about the principles of justice. This is possible if the concept of justice admits of different interpretations, or competing conceptions. ... Now consider a constitutional example. ... a court applying the just compensation clause would not necessarily decide a case as the original authors would have done .... Instead, a court would understand the Constitution to mean precisely what it says and thus to require just compensation. A court would need to defend a particular conception of just compensation ... against the most plausible alternatives. ... Contested concepts do not seem confined to morality and law. Their properties are at any rate similar to those of concepts referring to natural substances or phenomena, such as water and heat. On a plausible understanding of the development of science, for example, the caloric and kinetic theories of heat are (or at one time were) competing conceptions of the concept heat. ... If, as most people would agree, ‘heat’ refers to a determinate physical phenomenon, there can be, in principle, a best theory of heat. This implies that there can be a best conception of a contested concept. This suggests, in turn, that contested concepts in the Constitution might have best interpretations. ... Now if the idea that the Constitution includes contested concepts is correct, then to apply the Constitution in terms of their best interpretation is, in effect, to apply doctrines whose application is called for by the original Constitution. But, just as interpretation of the concept heat requires more than mere reflection, any interpretation of this type inevitably draws upon resources that are neither implicit in the text nor purely linguistic. It .... requires that courts applying ‘vague clauses’ of the Constitution interpret ‘contested concepts,’ which requires reasoning about moral or political principles.
(David Lyons, “Constitutional Interpretation and Original Meaning,” pp. 85-99; Social Philosophy & Policy 4 (1986), pp. 75-101.)
As I have written elsewhere:

If the law says that government employees must be paid in gold, then they may not be paid in iron pyrites, since iron pyrites is not in fact gold, even if those who wrote the law were ignorant of the difference. If the law says that fishermen may not hunt mammals, then in fact the law says they may not hunt dolphins, even if the lawmakers had thought dolphins were fish. Likewise, if the law says that involuntary servitude is forbidden, then the government may not conscript soldiers, since military conscription is in fact involuntary servitude, even if those who wrote the law did not recognize this.

Professor Lyons’ point is that precisely the same argument applies to moral terms: if the Constitution demands just compensation for victims of eminent domain, then such victims must receive whatever is actually just, not what the framers thought was just, since the Constitution says to give “just compensation” rather than saying to give “what we consider just compensation.” … The 19th-century abolitionist Lysander Spooner used similar arguments in his Unconstitutionality of Slavery, claiming that slavery was outlawed by various clauses in the Constitution even if the authors of those clauses had no such intention, because such phrases as “republican form of government” and “against domestic violence,” when interpreted in accordance with the correct moral and political theory, ruled out slavery.
(For more about Spooner’s approach to legal interpretation, see Randy Barnett’s article here.)

On what Constitutional basis, then, should state laws regulating private sexual conduct be struck down? (The 9th Amendment's “unenumerated rights” appear to bind only the Federal government.) I would point to the 14th Amendment’s stipulation that

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
What are the “privileges and immunities” of American citizens? What counts as “due process”? What counts as “equal protection”? These are contested concepts. What the authors of the amendment meant by them does not settle the question of their interpretation. After all, the Amendment doesn’t require “what we, the authors, deem equal protection of the laws.” It requires just what it says: equal protection of the laws. We need, then, to interpret these concepts in the light of the most defensible theory of the nature of rights, of due process, and of equality. But the most defensible such theory is libertarian natural rights theory.

But wouldn’t my approach to constitutional interpretation lead to a lot more than just the overturning of anti-sodomy statues? Wouldn’t it mean the wholesale imposition of libertarianism by the federal judiciary on the states? Indeed it would. Justice Holmes famously wrote in his regrettable Lochner dissent:

The liberty of the citizen to do as he likes so long as he does not interfere with the liberty of others to do the same, which has been a shibboleth for some well-known writers, is interfered with by school laws, by the Post Office, by every state or municipal institution which takes his money for purposes thought desirable, whether he likes it or not. The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics.
But Holmes, as usual, was wrong. Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics is exactly what the 14th Amendment does enact.

Some may ask whether it isn’t dangerous to have a powerful central government authorised to impose libertarian natural rights on the states, since there is no guarantee that such power will be used in the manner specified. I agree. I’m an anarchist, after all. I’m not saying that we should have a central government authorised to enforce libertarianism. I’m saying we do have one. That is what the Constitution, properly interpreted, establishes, whether we like it or not.

Barring anarchy, a more decentralised system, such as the United States enjoyed before the Constitution, might well be preferable. Still, as long as we do have such a centralised control system, I’m pleased whenever it makes a pro-liberty decision. As it did today.

Addendum: To see further discussion, click here.



Posted June 26th, 2003

Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog06-03.htm#05

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I Adjust

One of the best pieces in The Early Ayn Rand: A Selection from her Unpublished Fiction is Rand’s 1932 Red Pawn, a story set in a former monastery converted into a Soviet prison. (The story was written as a treatment for a still-unpublished screenplay, also by Rand, that is even today languishing in development hell over at Samuel Goldwyn Films.)

In his editorial introduction to Red Pawn, Leonard Peikoff writes that the story’s “subtheme” is the “philosophic identity of Communism and religion,” since both belief systems “equate virtue with selfless service” and “subordinate the individual to something allegedly higher (whether God or the state).” (p. 108) More recently I’ve seen some Objectivist source (I unfortunately forget which) describing this not merely as the subtheme but as the theme of Red Pawn.

Rand certainly disapproved of both Communism and religion. And she also agreed with Nietzsche’s claim that the two share important philosophical roots. But is that really a theme, or even a subtheme, of Red Pawn? Or is this a literary myth that needs to be nipped in the bud?

The one passage in Red Pawn that comes closest to addressing the relationship between Communism and religion is Rand’s description (pp. 130-31) of how the original Christian iconography on the monastery walls has been painted over with Marxist symbols and slogans:

Many centuries ago, the unknown hand of a great artist had spent a lifetime of dreary days immortalizing his soul on the chapel’s walls. None could tell what dark secret, what sorrow had thrown him out of the world into its last, forgotten outpost. But all the power and passion, all the fire and rebellious agony of his tortured spirit had been poured into the somber colors on the walls, into majestic figures of a magnificent life, the life his eyes had seen and renounced. And the bodies of his tortured saints silently cried of his ecstasy, his doubt, his hunger.
Because the old murals fail to “harmonize with his new culture,” a Soviet functionary endeavours to “improve them” by painting “a sickle and hammer on Moses’ tablets” and “a red flag into the raised hand of Saint Vladimir.”

But the ancient glazing that protected the murals, its secret lost with the monks, did not take fresh paint well. The red flag ran down the wall and peeled off in pieces. So Comrade Fedossitch had given up the idea of artistic alterations. He had compromised by tacking over Saint Vladimir’s stomach a bright-red poster bearing a soldier and an airplane, and the inscription: COMRADES! DONATE TO THE RED AIR-FLEET!
Below a painting of Jesus “in the clouds, His robe whiter than snow,” gazing down “with a sad, wise smile, His arms outstretched in silent invitation and blessing,” prisoners play chess with pieces “modeled out of stale bread,” on chessboards drawn with “cheap purple ink,” beside stacks of literary detritus – “The ABC of Communism, the first volume of a novel, a book of verse without a cover, a Ladies’ Guide to Fine Needlework, a manual of arithmetical problems for the first grade” – lined up on “rough, unpainted boards of bookshelves that cut into the angels’ snowy wings.”

I think one would have to have a tin ear for literature to read this passage as expressing the “philosophic identity” between Christianity and Communism. What comes across far more vividly is the contrast. The Christian influences in the chapel are beautiful, tragic, and enduring; the Communist influences are cheap, tawdry, and ephemeral.

This does not mean that Rand was an admirer of Christianity. As Peikoff correctly points out, Rand regards both belief systems as preaching the sacrifice of the individual; and we see that theme of sacrifice in Rand’s description of the monastery’s history:

Fanatical monks had chosen this bit of land in the Arctic waters off the Siberian coast; they had welcomed the snow and the winds, and bowed in voluntary sacrifice to a frozen world no man could endure for many years. The revolution had dispersed the monks and brought new men to the island, men who did not come voluntarily. (p. 111)
The fact that the first inhabitants were making a voluntary sacrifice and the later inhabitants an involuntary one does not change the fact that for Rand all such sacrifice is evil. The unknown artist’s murals express the agony of renouncing life, while Rand’s story is entirely against such a renunciation. Nevertheless, the monks’ sacrifice and the artist’s passion are portrayed as having something noble and heroic in them, even if in the service of a tragically misguided ideal. With the Communist ideal it is not so.

This does not mean that Rand regarded the Communist ideal as incapable of inspiring misguided but admirable saints of its own. Commandant Kareyev in Red Pawn is just such a saint (as is Andrei Taganov in Rand’s later novel We the Living). But although Red Pawn presents us with an attractively portrayed Communist idealist, Communist ideals are not themselves attractively portrayed. By contrast, the description of the murals in the former chapel can only be read as portraying Christian ideals attractively. (Which is not the same thing as endorsing them!) She could have described the religious icons the same way she described their Communist replacements: as ugly and soulless. She did not. Instead she imbued them with tragic grandeur.

I am not trying to make any deep point about Rand’s views on religion. Certainly she was quite capable of portraying religion as ugly and soulless. And there are even some passages in We the Living that allow Communist ideals an aura of (misguided) tragic grandeur. (I’m thinking in particular of her description of Kira listening to the Internationale, feeling the contrast between the ugliness of its explicit doctrine and the inspiring cadences of its music.) My point is rather that we should not automatically assume that everything Rand does in her fiction is driven is some very straightforward way by her ideology. I don’t really think Peikoff misread Red Pawn because he has, in general, a tin ear. I think he misread it because he came to it expecting that any juxtaposition of Communist and Christian symbols in a work of Rand’s must be intending to stress similarities, not differences. But whatever one thinks of the philosophical issues involved, the contrast she sets up in Red Pawn works far better artistically. And Rand was first and foremost an artist.


Posted June 22nd, 2003

Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog06-03.htm#04

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The Blogging Will Continue Until Morale Improves

In a Blog’s Stead has just been added to two online lists of academic blogs: www.henryfarrell.net/blog and rhetorica.net/professors_who_blog.htm. Check ’em out!


Posted June 18th, 2003

Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog06-03.htm#03

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Acts of God

Is the existence of a supreme being – i.e., God – praxeologically incoherent? That depends. If a supreme being need not be an agent, then praxeology, the a priori science of human action, has nothing to say about her existence one way or another. But suppose God is indeed thought of as an agent. In that case, there might seem to be three praxeological objections to the notion of a perfect being that is also an agent. They run as follows:

The Argument from Happiness

1a. A perfect being is necessarily completely happy.
2a. A completely happy being is never discontented with her present circumstances.
3a. Action necessarily involves discontent with one’s present circumstances.
4a. Therefore, a perfect being is never discontented with her present circumstances. (1a, 2a)
5a. Therefore, a perfect being cannot act. (3a, 4a)


The Argument from Omnipotence

1b. A perfect being is necessarily omnipotent.
2b. An omnipotent being would necessarily achieve her ends immediately, without intermediate means.
3b. Action necessarily involves the pursuit of ends via intermediate means.
4b. Therefore, a perfect being would necessarily achieve her ends immediately, without intermediate means. (1b, 2b)
5b. Therefore, a perfect being cannot act. (3b, 4b)


The Argument from Omniscience

1c. A perfect being is necessarily omniscient.
2c. An omniscient being would necessarily foresee all her future actions.
3c. Action necessarily involves prior uncertainty as to whether one will perform that action.
4c. Therefore, a perfect being would necessarily possess certain knowledge of its future actions. (1c, 2c)
5c. Therefore, a perfect being cannot act. (3c, 4c).
(These arguments are paraphrases of those offered by Ludwig von Mises in Chapter 2, Section 11 of Human Action.)

Are the arguments sound? Some of the premises of these arguments have recently been the subject of a dispute between my friends David Gordon and Gene Callahan. See Gordon’s article “Hazlitt for Our Time” and Callahan’s article “The Implications of Human Action.” (Milton Friedman says that when two Austrian theorists disagree about the implications of praxeology, they will inevitably resort to violence. So far, however Gordon and Callahan have been confining themselves to rational argument.) I’m going to wade into this dispute, siding with Gordon on some issues and with Callahan on others.

Neither Gordon nor Callahan thinks praxeology can disprove the existence of God. Nor do I. But Callahan accepts more of the premises than I do, and I accept more of the premises than Gordon does. Just think of me as a dialectical synthesis of their thesis and antithesis.

Let’s consider first the Argument from Happiness. In criticism of (3a) – “Action necessarily involves discontent with one’s present circumstances” – Gordon writes: “Not dissatisfaction with the present, but discontent with what would be the case if one did not act, is necessary for action.” Callahan replies that “the premonition of future dissatisfaction is itself a source of present unease.”

But surely Callahan’s reply is correct only if “present unease” means “unease in the present,” whereas in order to refute Gordon what Callahan needs it to mean is something like “unease about the present.”

Now Callahan would no doubt have a ready reply: unease in the present is a bad thing, something one wishes to get rid of, and so would automatically generate unease about the present as well. Still, one might wonder whether present unease (if “unease” is even the right word) about a possible future is necessarily a cause of unease about the present. If I’m uneasy about a possible future that I have no way of preventing, then that would indeed make me uneasy about the present as well. But if I can prevent the undesired possible future, why should my uneasiness about it make me uneasy about the present? Feeling “uneasy” about a possibility I can easily prevent doesn’t seem inconsistent with complete happiness.

Suppose Catherine de’ Medici is walking down the street, whistling happily. The whistling is certainly an action; but it doesn’t arise from a feeling of uneasiness. On the contrary, it arises from a feeling of cheerful contentment. She acts, not in order to change things, but to keep them from changing: she enjoys whistling, so she keeps whistling.

Is this a case in which Catherine is dissatisfied with the current situation? If the current situation is understood simply as one in which she is whistling, then indeed she is not dissatisfied with that; that is exactly the situation that she is acting to preserve. (Call this the “simple” sense.) But perhaps we should instead understand the “current situation” as a situation in which her whistling is on the verge of ceasing, and that is what she is dissatisfied with. (Call this the “sophisticated” sense.) Of course, Catherine’s whistling is on the verge of ceasing unless she intervenes; but in deciding whether to intervene she cannot take her intervention for granted, and so is allowed to consider only those features of the situation that will hold if she does not act.

Likewise, imagine a God who acts, not to change anything, but just to keep some process going because she wishes that it continue. Such a God needn’t feel any discomfort with the way things are going.

It might be objected that the whistling (in the first case) or the divine activity (in the second) is either an end in itself, or a means to some further end. If it is an end in itself, then it is not an application of means to ends, and so is not an action. If it is a means to a further end, then the Argument from Omnipotence comes into play. So let’s consider that argument.

Callahan accepts something like the Argument from Omnipotence: “an omnipotent being could remove all future sources of discontent in one fell swoop,” and so would have no need to “continually intervene in history to achieve his ends.” (Callahan thinks this is “not an argument against the existence of a supreme being” but rather “indicates that a supreme being, should he exist, cannot be comprehended by praxeological reasoning” – by which he seems to mean, not that God cannot act, but that God, if he acts, does so in a manner that transcends praxeology. I can’t make any sense of the notion of an action that transcends praxeology, however, so I’ll continue to write as though Callahan’s conclusion were (5b).)

I think premise (2b) – “An omnipotent being would necessarily achieve her ends immediately, without intermediate means” – and premise (3b) –“Action necessarily involves the pursuit of ends via intermediate means” – are ambiguous, because they do not take into account the distinction between internal and external means. As I have written elsewhere:

An external means bears a causal or instrumental relation to its end, while an internal means bears a logical or constitutive relation to its end. If Freud is right, then my motive in writing this … was to win “fame, fortune, and the love of women.” This would be an example of an external means. … By contrast, playing this particular chord here … is an internal means to playing the Moonlight Sonata. I'm not playing the chord as an end in itself; the chord's value to me lies in its contribution to the whole sonata. So the chord is a means – but not an external means. One test for the difference is to see whether it makes sense to wish for the end without the means. It makes sense to say, “I wish I could achieve fame, fortune, and the love of women without having to compose this …,” because the means and the end are logically separable; but it doesn’t make sense to say, “I wish I could play the Moonlight Sonata without having to play all these notes.” Just these notes, played in just this sequence, constitute the Moonlight Sonata; there’s nothing we could count as playing the Moonlight Sonata without playing the particular sequence of notes of which it is composed.
Hence Callahan’s claim that “any action undertaken now can only bear fruit in the future” is misleading; an internal means can be simultaneous with its end.

Omnipotence is ordinarily understood as the ability to do whatever is not logically impossible. It may be logically possible to bypass the external means to one’s ends, but it is not logically possible to bypass the internal means to one’s ends. Hence (3b) is true only if internal as well as external means are meant. And (2b) will be false in either case, because some internal means may require the use of external means. For example, it’s true that if God wants a certain process to continue, she can just will once and for all that it continue, without the need for further intervention from her; but what if the process whose continuation God desires is, or involves, a process of God’s doing something? (Just as Catherine’s desire is not simply that whistling occur but that she do the whistling.) It is no slight to God’s omnipotence to note that there is at least one sequence of events that God cannot set in motion once and for all without the need of any further action on her part, and that is a state of affairs in which God continues to act. Even the Almighty cannot dispense with means in achieving her end if using means is part of her end.

Mises and Callahan both suppose that God could never have reason to choose means to her ends, since she could achieve her ends at once, by an instantaneous act of will, without resorting to means. But what if one of God’s ends is to achieve her other ends by certain means and not others? (Including, perhaps, external means.) This happens all the time in ordinary life; for example, a virtuous person who desires to obtain more money does not choose theft as a means to that end, because she has a preference for employing moral rather than immoral means of satisfying her other preferences. It’s easy to miss this point if we fall into the mistake of thinking of “felt uneasiness” psychologistically, as an undesirable mental state, and action as a means of getting rid of that state. Of course in that case God would not need to act, because whatever psychological relief he gets from continuing to act he could get instead by simply inducing a feeling a satisfaction in himself directly. But not all our desires are about our mental states. (I argue further for this claim in my forthcoming book Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action, an early draft of which is available as a PDF file here.)

What about the Argument from Omniscience? Callahan accepts, while Gordon rejects, (3c): “Action necessarily involves prior uncertainty as to whether one will perform that action.” Gordon argues: “But what if just what I know is coming is that I will act in a certain way? … The fact that I am sure I shall have toast tomorrow for breakfast does not stop me from eating it tomorrow.” Callahan replies that while Gordon “may be ‘certain’ that he will attempt to have toast, in that he always does so on Tuesday morning,” nevertheless “that intention is subject to change.” For “if he wakes to find that a million dollars is waiting for him at a lawyer's office, if only he gets there immediately, wouldn't he contemplate skipping breakfast?” Callahan concludes that by “certain knowledge” Gordon means only “a very high degree of confidence,” whereas Callahan and Mises mean “inevitability with no possibility of alteration.”

So far I have sided more with Gordon than with Callahan. On this issue I shall be siding more with Callahan than with Gordon. But I do not think Callahan has described Gordon’s position quite correctly. I would bet that by “certain knowledge” Gordon means something stronger than “a very high degree of confidence” but weaker than “inevitability with no possibility of alteration.” If I have a very high degree of confidence that P, that is compatible not only with the possibility of not-p, but with not-p itself. If I have certain knowledge that p, that is (I suspect Gordon would say) compatible with the possibility that not-P, but not compatible with its actually being the case that not-p (since knowledge is a species of true belief). The inevitability of p, by contrast, is incompatible with both the possibility and the actuality of not-p.

compatible with
possibility of not-p?
compatible with
actuality of not-p?
confidence that pyesyes
knowledge that pyesno
inevitability of pnono

Thus when Gordon claims to know what he will have for breakfast, I suspect he regards this as committing him not to the claim that nothing could sway his decision, bit only that nothing will.

I think this reply would be decisive on behalf of Gordon’s position against Callahan’s, if I thought that the truth of p was compatible with the possibility that not-p. Nearly every philosopher on the planet thinks so, but I follow Aristotle in dissenting. (Aristotle’s dissent is in On Interpretation 9; I have defended his position in my doctoral dissertation.) In other words, I think that because Gordon has free will, it is not yet settled whether he will have toast for breakfast or not, and therefore it is, as yet, neither true nor false that he will have toast for breakfast. Since only true propositions can be known (at least in the sense of “knowledge” that I believe Gordon intends; there are of course other senses, equally legitimate in English usage), Gordon does not know what he will have for breakfast – though he knows what he intends to have, what he is overwhelmingly likely to have, etc.

So knowledge (uncontroversially) implies truth, and truth (controversially) implies necessity. So if I take myself to know that I am going to have toast tomorrow, then I must regard it as already settled that I will have toast tomorrow. But I cannot then regard the present means to my having toast tomorrow (say, buying bread today) as both necessary for toast tomorrow and open to my present choice. Hence if God is an agent, she cannot foresee her future free actions. (Nor will placing God outside time help; the old problems of temporal priority and posteriority among God’s beliefs and volitions simply reappear as problems of logical priority and posteriorty.)

So I agree with Callahan in endorsing (3c). But I depart from Callahan (and perhaps from Gordon too) in rejecting (2c): “An omniscient being would necessarily foresee all her future actions.” Omniscience means knowing everything there is to know. If predictions concerning free actions are, as yet, neither true nor false, then there is, as yet, no fact to know, and so a failure to know such things is no slight to God’s omniscience.

For what it’s worth, I do not as a matter of fact think that God, if there is one, could be an agent. But that’s because I do not think anything could be both a legitimate object of worship and a person. That’s a matter for another day, however.


Posted June 14th, 2003

Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog06-03.htm#02

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Khawaja versus Pipes

Today Praxeology.net inaugurates a new feature: guest editorials. The first one is A Response to Daniel Pipes by my friend Irfan Khawaja.

The article is a continuation of an earlier exchange here. Irfan argues that Daniel Pipes’ writings on militant Islam betray a “deficiency of vision” that has “repeatedly led Pipes to snap judgments; to playing fast and loose with evidence; to dabble in rumor, innuendo and defamation; and to a stubborn inability to admit mistakes, sometimes egregious ones.”

Interested in writing a guest editorial for Praxeology.net? Contact me.


Posted June 1st, 2003

Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog06-03.htm#01

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