Friday Metal: 3 Inches of Blood, “Battles and Brotherhood”

I saw these guys last fall at the 9:30 Club and they are old skool: big, shaggy dudes in denim vests covered with patches. Awesome.

McCarraher on Christianity and politics

Here’s a very interesting interview with lefty Catholic intellectual Eugene McCarraher (via). He has a lot to say about the Manhattan Declaration, Radical Orthodoxy (the line about the cult of Wendell Berry–ouch!), Herbert McCabe, and socialism.

Literalists, progresives, and Lost

I like this, from Newsweek:

Lost‘s viewers fall into two categories, those who adhere to reason and those who follow their faith. The Lost literalists believe that the show is infallible, that it’s not only an engrossing, entertaining television show, it’s holy writ–divinely inspired, all-knowingly conceived, and absolutely inerrant. In other words, the show’s many, many loose ends–the smoke monster, the polar bear–have to be resolved. The progressives like the show just fine, but they accept its limitations. They know that television shows adapt, that actors leave or get pregnant, budgets get cut, writers go on strike. More than that, they know that ideas change, that good ideas are orphaned in favor of great ones, that Lost doesn’t have to be perfect in order to be important. In short, Lost has gone beyond being just a show about faith to being a meta-commentary on faith.

Maybe not entirely surprisingly, I’m firmly in the progressive camp. I’ve always found Lost most compelling when seen as a parable of human existence, not a meticulously constructed imagined reality. Obviously, some degree of continuity and–I won’t say plausibility–coherence are necessary for any satisfying storytelling, but I really couldn’t care less about the polar bear, Walt’s super powers, etc.

It’s interesting how many SF fans take a “literalistic” approach to the genre’s products. The “continuity police” types so familiar on message boards (and, in days of yore, in comic book letter columns) seem strangely incongruous with the suspension of disbelief necessary to get fantasy and SF off the ground.

ADDENDUM: Nice pre-S6 write-up from the AV Club’s Noel Murray (whose Lost reviews I read faithfully).

The rehabilitation of U.S. Grant

Interesting review of a new biography of Ulysses S. Grant from historian Sean Wilentz. At the time of his death, and for quite a while thereafter, President Grant was among the most revered men in the nation. But his reputation took a sharp turn downward, in part, according to Wilentz, because of the rising school of pro-Southern “revisionist” Civil War history, which flourished during the early part of the 20th century. Wilentz argues that it’s high time for a rehabilitation. Particularly interesting is the way, in Wilentz’s telling, Grant’s reputation fluctuated according to the political currents of the time (he was a Northern imperialist to “Lost Cause” Southern apologists, a white, racist imperialist to the 60s New Left, etc.).

The return of the sanctimonious carnivore

Via Jean Kazez, two (quite possibly bogus) trend stories about “vegetarians” jumping on the “happy” meat bandwagon: here and here.

I’m with Jean in thinking that almost any step toward better treatment of animals is a good thing. If more people are buying humanely raised meat, then animals are suffering less, which is all to the good. The hard-line vegan position of opposing any reforms short of total abolition of animal farming just isn’t going to do much to better the lot of the billions of actually existing animals in the factory farming system. (I do think the radical vegan position is a valuable ideal, just not one that is likely to see widespread adoption in our lifetimes.)

All that said, the denizens of hipster butcher shops and vegans-turned-bacon-aficionados profiled in these articles come off as incredibly smug and annoying. Can we please stop pretending that getting your meat from a trendy, high-end butcher shop constitutes some primal experience that deeply connects you with the cycle of life? Why is it that so many foodies, including but not limited to Michael Pollan, seem to believe that the truest way of communing with an animal is killing and eating it?

“A gimmick that won’t solve our economic problems”

Some on-point reactions to the President’s announced “spending freeze”: Andrew Leonard on the anti-stimulus and Glenn Greenwald on the sanctity of military spending.

UPDATE: More analysis from Paul Krugman and Matthew Yglesias.

Addendum on personhood

Just to further clarify what I think is wrong with Margaret Somerville’s “personhood” argument discussed below: she essentially wants to evacuate the notion of person of any substantive content and make it coterminous with human being. Thus, saying that a human animal is a person isn’t a factually informative statement; it becomes a tautology.

Note, though, that once this move is made, the possession of personhood can no longer function as a reason for according special moral status to human beings. “Being a person” and “being a human being” are, on this view, just two different expressions for the same status.

But this is surely not what traditional moral philosophers (e.g., Kant) had in mind when they distinguished between persons and non-persons. For them, persons had special moral worth because of some property that persons–and only persons–possessed such as the ability to follow the moral law. This is why, on the traditional view, it makes sense to ask whether there can be non-human persons, whether terrestrial (e.g., dolphins) or extra-terrestrial (e.g., space aliens or angels). On Somerville’s view, it would literally be nonsensical to ask if there could be non-human persons.

Now, personally, I’m not sure personhood is even a particularly important concept for morality, but that’s a whole other post.

Personhood, human and animal

Well, since we’re on the topic of the personhood of non-human entities, here’s an article by Margaret Somerville, a Canadian law professor, arguing that we shouldn’t apply the concept of “person” to non-human animals (via the First Things blog):

My reasons for rejecting personhood for animals include that it would undermine the idea that humans are “special” relative to other animals and, therefore, deserve “special respect.”

Professor Somerville cites the views of Peter Singer, among others, to show that attributing “personhood” to animals would blur the boundary between humans and non-human animals which would lead to bad consequences, such as euthanasia. This is because Singer, et al. understand personhood to be a category that is tied to having certain capabilities (e.g., for self-reflection). By this criterion, some animals would count as persons, but not all humans will (e.g., infants, the severely mentally disabled).

Prof. Somerville rejects this capabilities approach to defining personhood and says that the category should be restricted to only (and all) human beings:

The contrasting approach, which I believe is the one we should continue to uphold, is that all humans are persons (at least, as the law stands at present, those humans who have been born) and only humans are persons. This accounts for using the words “human being” and “person” interchangeably. Universal human personhood means that every human being has an “intrinsic dignity” that must be respected that comes simply with being human; having that dignity does not depend on having any other attribute or functional capacity. This is a status approach to who is a person.

The closest Prof. Somerville comes in identifying any substantial human characteristic that justifies ascribing personhood to (only) us is to say that “we humans have a ‘human spirit,’ a metaphysical, although not necessarily supernatural, element as part of the essence of our humanness.” But without further specification, this is either a reversion to some variant of the capabilities definition or essentially an arbitrary decision to confine the label “person” only to humans. After all, traditional philosophy and theology typically defined the “human spirit” precisely in terms of the sort of capabilities (rationality, free will, etc.) that Prof. Somerville earlier rejected as necessary conditions for personhood. It seems that what she’s advocating is a kind of metaphysical fiction–that we act “as if” human beings have an essentially undefinable metaphysical spark that confers personhood.

For my money, if we want to say that humans, qua humans, are more valuable than non-human animlas, then we’d do well to drop “person” as a moral category altogether. There is just no non-question-begging bright line to be drawn between persons and non-persons that includes all and only humans in the category of persons. If you say that “person” means an entity with properties x, y, and z, then you simply can’t rule out the possibility that some animals will end up counting as persons and some humans won’t. But if, on the other hand, you’re just going to restrict “person” to human beings by fiat, then why do you need the concept of person in the first place? What philosophical or moral work is it doing?

Free speech and corporate personhood

I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t make an informed comment on the legal aspects of yesterday’s SCOTUS campaign-finance ruling (though I know plenty of lawyers who are likely disgusted with it, including some former Supreme Court clerks). But what I find wrong with it is that it contradicts the heart of one of the most compelling argument for free speech.

J.S. Mill, the grand-daddy of liberalism, argued for freedom of speech on many grounds, but one of the most important was that we can only arrive at the truth if all points of view get a vigorous airing. We need to be able to change course, to correct our views, by being exposed to a variety of competing truth-claims. This is an inherent part of what it means to be a human being realizing our nature as what Mill called “progressive beings.” By engaging in dialogue and argument with competing views, we may come to see that we were mistaken, or that we had overlooked part of the truth. At the very least, we’ll be strengthened in our own views by testing them against counter-arguments.

However, given this view of why free speech matters, the absurdity of treating corporations as “persons” with free speech rights becomes readily apparent. A corporation is not a “progressive being” that can correct its errors and come to a greater comprehension of the truth. It is an entity driven entirely by the profit motive. A corporation will propagate a particular message only to the extent that the message serves that interest: it’s not concerned with the truth.

You might say by way of rejoinder that it doesn’t matter whether corporations are interested in pursuing the truth. All that matters is that people are exposed to the widest possible range of ideas, regardless of their provenance. But this ignores that fact that, with unlimited corporate political “speech” we are no longer working with the model of a conversation aimed at truth, but with an attempt to overwhelm and drown competing points of view with a sheer volume of ads, propaganda, etc. The ideal of rational discussion is pretty much explicitly repudiated by allowing corporations to flood the airwaves with whatever “truths” best serve their interests. Free speech, by its very nature, presupposes something like reasoned dialogue; that’s what distinguishes it from propaganda, advertising, and similar endeavors, which are not good-faith arguments, but are aimed at bypassing rational dialogue.

Corporations aren’t persons: they’re money-making enterprises. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but their interests should be subordinated to and circumscribed by those of actual persons.

Friday Metal Synth-Pop: Bat For Lashes, “Sleep Alone”

I’m pretty obsessed with this album at the moment.