Bruce Waller has an interesting question about free will and moral responsibility. He asks, why not mix the two concepts instead of treating them as one and the same? Sounds pluralistic to me, and I’m all for the pluralism freedom gives us.
[Email comments welcome: duoism(at)sbcglobal.net]Even as President Putin of Russia signed legislation this week giving him sole power to appoint governors, the ailing and elderly Mikhail Gorbachev gave a speech decrying the reduction of freedom in Russia. But to Mr. Putin, Mr. Gorbachev’s freedom meant the loss of empire and the rise of “gangster capitalism” in Russia, so the two men have very different views on the benefits of freedom.
Both men are steeped in Marxism during their political careers, although Gorbachev is better described today as being ‘communist,’ not Marxist, and Mr. Putin is better described as a ‘religious nationalist,’ also no longer a Marxist. There is no freedom in Marx’s thought, as both Jaspers and Arendt pointed out, so the two men are disputing freedom in the traditional argument as being merely a theme or topic of political discourse.
Gorbachev won the Nobel Prize for Peace but neither man has freedom as a philosophy, and it shows.
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Over at the BHL blog, the philosophers are caught up in the usual contention about what is ‘liberty,’ and the definitional short-comings of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ freedom. The absolutist view simply thunders like Moses on high that ‘liberty is liberty,’ while the religious/socialist determinist is going to shake her head and sneer, ‘it’s all an illusion.’
I believe the “problem” is solved by recognizing that there is no word in the English language which correctly describes two thoughts: human freedom is moral, not an ideal, and that liberty without some tempering self-constraint is catabolic, not life-flourishing.
I propose in Duoism the term, ‘freedomist,’ and define it as ”a freedomphilic, prudent, pragmatic pluralist.” Plenty of self-constraint there, and by an association with philosophy the term, over time, will acquire its correlation with morality.
It’s a suggestion.
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Michael Kinsley argued in today’s Bloomberg that compulsory payment of union dues by workers who choose not to join a union is both “fairness” and “common sense,” because if the non-members did not pay union dues, then their pay from the employer is free-riding. It’s an old argument that has a quick emotional appeal, especially for determinists who deny free will. But if the philosophy of freedom is applied to the argument, then compulsory union dues by non-union members is no human right.
The entire case for compulsory union dues for non-union employees vitiates free choice. There is no requirement that the employer pay his non-union employees the same pay rate as the union employees, and so long as the employer freely chooses to pay all employees the same rate, the union loses the logic of compulsory dues for non-members.
The employer freely chose to pay his non-union employees the same rate that he pays his union workers, and the non-union workers freely chose to not join the union. The only way to justify the compulsion to pay dues to an association by non-members is by an emotional appeal to what is ‘fair.’ But note, the emotional appeal is used because the compulsion is completely anti-freedom, so the appeal is a form of emotional blackmail, trying to flip morality in order to trump the logic of their immoral unfairness.
It is NOT a human right to compel financial support to a non-member of a voluntary association! Do churches compel the workers who paint their buildings or mow their lawns to pay into the donation plate? Compulsory dues for non-members of a voluntary association is not ‘fairness.’ It’s extortion, in the form of moral blackmail.
[Email comments welcome: duoism(at)sbcglobal.net]The new phrase in the Middle East to describe the frequent violence and killing is that it is time “to cut the grass.’ The phrase communicates the regularity that Israel receives a blow and then responds with a strike of its own. It is a pessimistic metaphor, establishing both the short-term nature of lulls in the fighting and the routine chore-like response by Israel of killing the ever-growing killers.
After sixty years of bloodletting, it should be clear that the violence against Israel is not going to stop. There will not be a two-state solution and a one-state solution is impossible. The hatred against the Jew is endemic for 1,400 years, and ‘cutting grass’ means the hate is never-ending.
Israel’s demographics mean that it will become a majority Arab Muslim state at the end of this century (by my calculations, between 2097-2098), just three generations from now. How many more Jews and Muslims are going to die cutting grass in the defense of a Jewish state that eventually will become Muslim?
Israel should have another Exodus. I suggest the 49th parallel of North America, where the Jews can build a peaceful paradise of culture and civilization on the ‘Peace Border’ that will endure for the next 5,000 years. The Americans and Canadians on their ‘Peace Border’ regularly mow lawns, not buildings and children.
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One of the notable features of the hard-Right in politics is their constant contest against an enemy. If they do not have an enemy, they will seek one. If they do not find an enemy, they will create one. For the hard-Right to exist, they must have an enemy.
On the hard-Left, shifting blame to an enemy and making excuses are a fixture. Instead of wanting to confront an enemy, the hard-Left simply blames the enemy for all of the Left’s mis-steps and failures. It is always someone else who is at fault; the Left never makes mistakes, only its enemies do. The Left believes they create only ‘progress.’ They are psychologically incapable of understanding how often their social progress is actually a social regress, just as the Right is psychologically incapable of understanding that not every opponent is an enemy.
What the two extremes lack is a basic trust in human beings, and they also share a self-limiting inability to recognize that their worst enemy stares back at them from a mirror.
At an international conference in Turkey today, the Prime Minister blasted the U.N. Security Council for failing to act on Syria’s shelling of Turkish territory. The Turkish Prime Minister accused the Council of not representing the interests of a broad number of nations–undeniably true, since there are only five permanent members–and calls for peace around the world are over-ruled by a veto from just one of the elite five.
He makes an excellent argument. For the 21C, how about expanding the Security Council from five to eleven permanent members, and include South America and Islam on the Council? Make the vetoes by three nations required to halt Security Council military and non-military actions. Especially, change the focus of the Council from world peace to world freedom, and require that economic liberties in the Philosophy of Human Rights be a staple of the national education system of all permanent members of the Council.
A potential permanent, eleven-member Security Council for the 21C: Brazil, Britain, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Russia, Turkey, and the United States.
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This is a map of the Kurd populations in the Middle East. Note the thumb-shaped section of north-east Syria called al-Hasakah, the city and province of Syria most distant from the capital of Damascus.
Syria is engaged in what the government calls, a civil war. 36,000 dead and counting. For some obscure reason, from its northwestern-most border areas, Syria has been shelling towns in Turkey and the Turks have responded in kind. Artillery battles across international borders does not make a “civil war.”
Majority-Sunni Syria is governed by an Alawite minority, so the designation of “civil war” misidentifies what is actually an uprising of the majority population against its repressive minority rulers. Instead of a civil war, what is occuring in Syria is a bid for freedom by the majority.
Far from most of the battles, the Kurds as the majority population in al-Hasakah bide their time. If the Kurds are ever to have their own country–they are the only major people left in the 21C world without a 20C nation-state–the ‘civil war’ in Syria might be the best catalyst for al-Hasakah to break off from Syria and begin an independent Kurdistan. Later, an already autonomous Kurdistan in Iraq might like to break away from majority-Shi’a Iraq and join their brothers and sisters in creating a new, independent Kurdish state.
Perhaps Duoism should be translated into Kurdish.
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In the May 15th issue of U.S./China Focus, scholar Hong Nong of the China Institute at the University of Alberta detailed the historical argument of China’s sovereignty within the “Nine Dashes” of the South China Sea. In the above graph, note how close the nine dashes are to the shorelines of Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines, and how very far they are from the coast of China. It is China’s claim since 1947 that all of the area within the nine dashes is Chinese, under China’s sovereignty.
On the southeast coast of China, note the city of Hainan. This Chinese city has the largest modern submarine base, and note how important this military base’s location is for the control of the entire South China Sea. The sea is so important because it is the major sea route between Asia and Europe, between Asia and India, and between Asia and Africa. Which is another way of saying, the South China Sea is the potential choke-point between oil shipped from the Middle East to the oil-starved Japan and China.
Nearly everyone in the world regards China’s claim of sovereignty over 80% of the South China Sea as preposterous. But none of the disputants have a deep water submarine base to contest China’s claim. The U.S. Navy, however, in eternal vigilance to the theories of Mahan, regularly patrols the South China Sea, dedicated to keeping these sea lanes open to all nations. Think of the parochial and preposterous Chinese claim on the South China Sea as part and parcel of their contemptuous attitude toward the Philosophy of Human Rights.
[Email comments welcome: duoism(at)sbcglobal.net].Ken Anderson, professor of international law and a human rights stalwart, had an article yesterday in ‘Defining Ideas,’ the blog of the conservative Hoover Institute. It’s always good to see a conservative intellectual committed to human rights; wish there were more listing the Philosophy of Human Rights to be one of their three philosophical specializations at the Philosophical Documentation Center.
Professor Anderson’s article enumerates the many shocking failures and moral short-comings of the U.N., and argues that the institution loses legitimacy as a result. Worse, the legitimacy is reduced to the ephemeral eternal hope that the U.N. will somehow get better in the future. This is the same kind of ‘hope’ that gives Marxism and socialism and all monistic (Platonic) ideo/theologies their legitimacy: the eternal monistic idealistic hope that all the past failures are merely a prelude to getting it finally right sometime in the distant future. So, armed with such ghost-legitimacy idealism (Plato again), the U.N. merely marches in place, never moving forward but always in motion. The good professor calls this U.N. phenomenon, ‘perpetual immobility.’
Despite his use of the word, “perpetual,” Professor Anderson never mentioned the original concept of the U.N. and the League of Nations is from Immanuel Kant’s essay, “Perpetual Peace,” where Kant disdained short-lived peace treaties and argued instead that an enduring world peace will never be possible until a world freedom is constructed first. The League of Nations–his league of peace–would be an organization made up of the few free nations, and then all of the many un-free nations would voluntarily join the league. By the association with free nations, over time, the un-free would gradually become free.
Kant’s formulation is working. In the 65 years since the United Nations was created, for every year that the world is less-free, there are seven years where the world is more-free. As Kant pointed out, it is the positive correlation ( currently .67) between freedom and prosperity that attracts the un-free nations to membership in the free nations’ United Nations, not the monistic ideal of peace. A word to all Platonic monistic idealists: freedom is a moral and plural; peace suffers as a monism and an ideal.
Certainly the U.N. requires major reforms. However, it is not simply marching in place and should not be scrapped. The United Nations is steadily–if all too slowly and even unknowingly–achieving what Kant designed it to do two hundred years ago: achieve world freedom. World peace will be the indirect result.
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Theofacism:
Relocate Israel?
Due: 3-31-13
Duoism: The Philosophy of Freedom
Due: 12-12-12
Qutb & Rawls:
Two Myths of
Social Justice
Due: 12-13-14
Duoist Diet: The Philosophy of Dieting
Due: 11-12-13
The Craving
(a crime novel)
Due: 1-6-16
Blue!
(sports/crime novel)
Due: 1-5-15
G2
(a stage play)
Due: 1-7-17
David's Lament
(a stage play)
Due: 1-8-18
The Second Texas Secession
(a political novel)
Due: 6-1-16
Sophrosyne:
The Philosophy
of Self-Mastery
Due: 1-9-19
Nietzsche's Herd: Voluntary Totalitarianism
Due: 1-12-21
Objectivity & Its Objections
Due: 2-20-20
Omnivore:
Consciousness &
Self-Destruction
Due: 2-22-22
Amoral
Morality
Due: 12-22-22
